Sydney will go dark on Saturday to urge Australia to cut greenhouse emissions by 5 percent

[Selatius]

SYDNEY, Australia - Homes and businesses in Australia's largest city will switch off lights for an hour Saturday to protest excessive greenhouse gas emissions.

Iconic downtown landmarks including the Sydney Harbor Bridge and nearby Opera House will fade under the glow of an almost full moon and the ubiquitous golden arches of McDonald's restaurants will disappear.

Almost 2,000 businesses and 53,000 homes in this city of four million people have pledged to turn their lights off for an hour Saturday evening as a show of support for a goal to cut Sydney's greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent in the next 12 months, said the World Wild Fund for Nature, better known as WWF-Australia, which is organizing the "Earth Hour" event.

"If all the lights go down, it will look like 70, 80 years ago," WWF spokesman Andy Ridley said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070331/ap_on_re_au_an/australia_blackout

Fucking awesome.

[Erika]

1. They get it

Would love to see that here but those in power would scream about a loss in profits. It's only about money to
them.

[sandnsea]

2. One honest question

I think it would be awesome and wish this country would do something like this too.

But, when we had the big outage in the northeast, I think I remember them saying powering up the system can be a high energy task too. It takes less energy to keep everything going than to fire it up after it's been dark. Is that right, anybody got info?

By the way, in any other administration that outage would be a catastrophic failure - this administration is so bad that most folks don't even think about the fact that this President did nothing to fix a problem that caused 1/7th of the population to lose energy. This was the pre-Katrina warning. And way too many people are still more afraid of a Democratic President than the cluster fuck we're living in now. Amazing.

[razzleberry]

3. these people negotiated themselves an increase ...

Australia's 'Kyoto target number' is 108 percent.
almost everyone else received a decrease, typically 92 percent.
This story is meaningless rubbish.

[aikoaiko]

4. World Wrestling Federation? hehe

;)