By Sara Phillips

This Saturday night at 8.30pm, the world will be switching its lights off, according to green group, the WWF

This year, 120 countries will take part in the event, up from just one – Australia – in 2007.

That means people in around 60 per cent of recognised nations of the world will be rummaging through drawers to find candles come 8.30pm. By anyone’s measure, it’s been a very successful campaign.

(In the picture: The Sydney Harbour Bridge during last year’s Earth Hour. Credit: James Alcock (WWF (Fairfax))

In December 2006 I went to the inaugural launch of Earth Hour at the Sydney Theatre. Up on stage, the good folk from WWF spoke excitedly about the message the self-imposed black-out would send to our leaders and the world about our concern for climate change.

“In a world first, Sydney will turn off its lights for one hour at 7.30pm on Saturday March 31, 2007 as a major step towards reducing the city’s greenhouse gas pollution,” said the press release issued at the time.

“The Earth Hour campaign will send a powerful message to the world that it’s possible to work together to make a massive contribution to reducing the effects of global warming,” WWF chief Greg Bourne was quoted as saying.

The message seemed to be loud and clear: we could make a dint in the world’s greenhouse gases if we all worked together and switched off our lights.

And that’s where Earth Hour went wrong.

At the launch I asked whether switching off our lights would imply that to be green people were expected to sit around in the dark. I was assured that it was all about the symbolism of the event.

Why, then, did the WWF release information about the purported drop in electricity use during the 2007 hour: 10.2 per cent, apparently?

This figure was later dissected with a disapproving scalpel in The Australian by an American PhD student and found to be “statistically indistinguishable from zero”.

This year, on their dedicated Earth Hour website, WWF has backed away from their earlier enthusiasm for discussing the dip in electricity use.

“Earth Hour recognises that the energy reductions brought about by a one hour ‘lights out’ campaign is not going to have a significant effect on energy consumption and is certainly not sufficient enough to turn the tide on climate changing carbon emissions. Therefore, we do not engage in the measurement of energy/carbon reduction levels.”

Greg Bourne said their 2010 focus on things other than the electricity usage was an attempt to get people thinking about more than just lights.

“Switching off your lights is a great first step, but your true environmental impact is much bigger than just your energy bill. Each individual’s environmental impact – or environmental footprint – is made up of things such as the food you eat, the transport and housing you choose, and the goods and services you buy.”

Indeed, this year the WWF’s release on Earth Hour is full of helpful advice about taking public transport and doing away with disposable coffee cups.

With an estimated 50 million people taking part last year, and more expected this year, the WWF has certainly captured the imagination of the world’s businesses and citizens. However the question remains about what message is getting through.

The media are notorious for crunching subtleties of messages out and delivering the basic information. When digested at the next level down by people scanning a newspaper or website or listening to the radio or TV in between bites of toast and rushing out the door to work, the subtleties are squeezed out again.

The subtleties of the Earth Hour message – that it’s not about saving electricity, it’s about the symbolism – have been well and truly lost.

If you need evidence, look to the group that has started in opposition to Earth Hour. “Human Achievement Hour” is an invention of US think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute. It encourages participants to celebrate this hour, which coincides with Earth Hour, by turning on all their lights and using as much electricity as possible to celebrate the fact that they can.

“We salute the people who keep the lights on and produce the energy that helps make human achievement possible,” Myron Ebell, CEI’s Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy is quoted as saying.

CEI Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer says, “Those who wish to celebrate Earth Hour should sit in the dark, turn off the heat, and breathe as little as possible.”

Even Bourne himself seems confused when he describes switching off the lights as “a great first step”. Sitting in the dark is hardly sustainable behaviour – what happens when you want to read a book? Or cook dinner? If it’s such a great first step surely we should try to do it all the time. But of course, that’s not feasible.

Sitting in the dark is not sustainable for more than a symbolic hour. And if anyone is going to understand the concept of sustainability it ought to be the green groups.

The fact that the chief of the WWF himself is mixed in his messages is proof that the Earth Hour message is well and truly scrambled. A global audience of over 50 million people have been led to believe they have to sit in the dark to be green.

ABC Environment