But, guess what?

Power plants generate electricity based upon trends over periods of time. Power plants don't turn on and off with a switch. It takes days to dial down production, weeks to turn them off and weeks to turn them back on.

You turn off your lights, but the power for that is still being generated. Your power plant produces it, you don't use it and then it gets passed onto another grid and your plant doesn't get money for it and eventually has to raise your rates because it's losing money.

Now, it passes onto another grid, which is producing based on its own trends in demand and people there are turning off their lights too so there is extra power there, which is added to your extra power and moves on again.

People across the country are turning their lights off, so the amount of extra power generated increases geometrically.

It's not used, it eventually gets grounded away.

So, on an ordinary day, X amount of power is used for Y amount of greenhouse gasses.

The goal is to make Y lower. But the result of Earth Hour is to make X lower. Making the proportion of greenhouse gasses to power used even worse.

Congrats, you're not only morons but you're making pollution worse and you're contributing to increasing costs of enegy.

[Edited by Dhampy, 3/26/2010 11:26:39 AM]

We are all idiots!

People use electricity like it originates at the switch on the wall. Intellectually they know how it works, but they don't consider it on an everyday basis.

The best possible thing you can do to reduce greenhouse gasses through tweaking electricity consumption is to turn off lights and devices in rooms you aren't in and do it 24/7/365.

Short bursts of moderation are more harmful than overuse.

I love electricity too much =D