Google takes part in Earth Hour

[Marik]

Earth Hour is an event, scheduled to take place tonight, in which everyone is encouraged to turn off lights for one hour. Google has joined in and replaced their homepage’s traditional white background with a black background. Google explains, “Google users 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.” Earth Hour has been gaining in popularity and, with this last-minute feature on Google, seems like it will work pretty well.

Earth Hour started last year as an initiative to get everyone in Sydney, Australia to turn of their lights for an hour. It worked quite well: icons such as the Sydney Opera House had the lights off, weddings were held by candlelight, and 2.2 million people had their lights out for an hour. If the same thing happened every day for a year, just in Sydney, the greenhouse gases saved would be equivalent to taking 48,616 cars off the road for a year. Now they want it to go global: wherever you live, turn your lights off at 8:00 PM local time.

Source: EarthHour