EARTH HOUR..........

Earth Hour is an annual international event held on the last Saturday of March that asks households and businesses to turn off their lights and non-essential electrical appliances for one hour on the evening. The event is promoted by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Australia and the Sydney Morning Herald.
The first Earth Hour was held on 31 March 2007 in Sydney, Australia between 7:30 pm and 8:30 pm. The 2007 Earth Hour is estimated to have cut Sydney's mains electricity consumption by between 2.1% and 10.2% for that hour, with as many as 2.2 million people taking part. Earth Hour 2008 was held internatioanlly on 29 March 2008 at 8 pm local time until 9 pm, marking the first anniversary of the event with many partner cities and individuals around the world participating. Earth Hour may also help reduce light pollution, and in 2008, coincides with the beginning of National Dark Sky Week in the USA. The 2009 Earth Hour will be held on March 28, 2009.
Earth Hour 2008

Strong backing from the City of Sydney and its Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, helped to make Earth Hour 2008 an international event.The official Earth Hour website has confirmed that over 286,000 people and over 20,000 businesses have signed up for the event as of 1pm GMT.

As of 30 March, over 11,900 businesses and nearly 300,000 individuals had registered to indicate their intention to participate.

Participants

Google

A web screenshot of Google's 'darkened' homepage on March 29, 2008.

Earth Hour has also received the backing of the Google corporation. From 12:00 AM on March 29, 2008 until the end of that day, the Google homepage in the United States, Canada, Ireland and the UK was turned to a black background. Their tagline is, "We've turned the lights out. Now it's your turn - Earth Hour." Also on their website, Google explained that everyone should turn their lights out from 8:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M. in your specific local times. According to their website:

Google users in Canada [or Ireland, UK, US] will notice today that we "turned the lights out" on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don't do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, Vladivostok, Cairo, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

Given our company's commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Earth Hour campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful global event.