North Korea... Where it's #EarthHour ALL THE TIME! pic.twitter.com/t9CsDjtYWi— Political Paradox (@PoliParadox) March 26, 2017
Is it me or does this event become more of a non-event every year? Earth Hour started in Sydney Australia in 2007 and went international the following year. As I recall, in the days leading up the the big day, there was quite a bit of media coverage in those first few years but as each year passed, the coverage seemed to dwindle. This past Saturday I didn't even know about it until it was mentioned on my local newscast Saturday morning.
Not that I participate in Earth Hour or anything. Quite frankly, it's a huge waste of time. Just another example of what I call "SLACKtivism". Those people who think changing a Facebook picture after a terrorist attack or putting some inspirational quote in their e-mail signature somehow changes the world. Of course, nothing really gets achieved. Forget the fact that burning a candle is far worse for the planet than burning a light bulb.
As each year passes, statistics on how much power was reduced seems to be harder to come by. The only province where stats are readily reported on is British Columbia. Reports from Toronto suggest this year's earth hour may have been the worst ever. A newspaper in the Niagara area suggested people participated this year however they failed to compare it to previous years. Last year, media in my city were all too eager to hype up earth hour ahead of time but failed to report on how we did after the fact. So I decided to tweet my local power company on numbers locally here in Kitchener and they got back to me about 12 hours later. What? No one in the local media could have bothered to do that? I'm not a reporter... I'm a nobody and they easily got me the answer I wanted. The reality is, the media rarely report on anything unless someone bothers to send them a press release. You know earth hour is getting really bad when even the media doesn't seem to care anymore.
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