I’m proud that Sydney is the very first city on this globe to start a city wide environmental friendly event - the earth hour. Last night, from 7:30pm - 8:30pm, all the business buildings turned their lights off. In continuing this trend there’s also another movement called “Lights off Australia” - The first Wednesday of each month has been designated Lights Off Australia night, when residents switch off lights and businesses turn off lights that aren’t required overnight.

I respect the efforts put into these events and I hope they do some good to the environment. However, I’m not quite sure if it saves much green house gas emission in return. What I saw from the news report is that restaurants and pubs were turning lights off but lighting up candles to light up the rooms. I would think burning candles would directly emit CO2 and is alot less energy efficient as fluorescence light.

Even though there’s criticism on Al Gore’s way of living, I have to give credit to him that he had a successful PR campaign and spread of the word to the world. I hear the word “green house gas” at least once a day after his release of “The inconvenient truth”. I was surprised to see even on a Chinese agile development mailing list, I saw this translation of some of the messages from the movie into Chinese.

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Lastly, I wish to promote a new environmental news site, plantchange.com, developed by my friend, Luke Miller, who just came back from 1 yr of volunteer work at Mongolia.

“An Australian first one-stop news site seeks to
empower all Australians to contribute to the climate change debate and take
real action on this globally-important issue.

With the environmental debate moving so fast at the moment, plantchange.com
seeks to put Australians in the know and allow people to see what’s being
said - and done - by our politicians, businesses, community leaders and
individuals.”