How to Cut Over 70,000 Kilos of CO2 Emissions in 60 Minutes

The energy saving hour is an event that occurs once every year. Over 182 cities from all over the world take part, and its purpose is to promote the idea of energy saving and increase its importance and awareness. The event is also known as the Earth Hour, and it is due to occur next on March 26th 2011 on a global scale.

In the earth hour event, people, companies, and anyone who is interested in participating is required to turn off as many appliances and machines as possible to save energy for a whole hour, so that we can appreciate the energy we have and learn to use it correctly and efficiently.

It is important to spread the word of the energy saving hour event. This is why participants often go out and tell others what they are doing and why. The earth hour has the potential of saving very large amounts of energy - 70 tonnes is below the normal amount for each of the 182 cities that took part in 2010.

Here are some records that you might find useful in understanding how much the earth hour can actually help. The figures may vary depending on sources, but here some examples of the accepted amounts:

o Bangkok: 165,000,000 Watts saved; equal to approximately 100 tonnes of carbon dioxide emission.

o Toronto: 900,000,000 Watts saved; equal to approximately 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide emission.

o Luzon, Philippines: 102,000,000 Watts saved; equal to approximately 70 tonnes of carbon dioxide emission.

As you can see, the smallest of these figures is the example given in the title and it is attached to a relatively small area. With the demands of energy increasing every year, it is obvious that turning off our lights, appliances, business machines, computers, TVs and anything else that is not needed at the time (or that we can make do without) will only save more and more energy as time goes by.

Even bigger than the amount of energy the earth hour saves is the message it carries - if 182 locations are taking part, we can see that saving energy is an endeavor that is taken seriously by many, many people and organizations across the world. It is the perfect opportunity for us to not only save energy and spread the word of doing so, but also to teach the younger generation the value of energy as they will be in our position one day and unless we make them understand the importance of energy saving, it is unlikely that they will do so in the future.

We should all take part in the Earth hour event. It is totally free of cost and it is definitely worth one hour a year.

If we consider the (increasing) size of the Earth Hour event, we will notice that there must be a reason why so many parts of the world are taking part. People have different motives for tackling global climate change - some are concerned that very large numbers of habitats, plants and animals are becoming extinct, while everyone who is aware of this is concerned that wiping out even us humans is well within the range of global warming's destructive potential.

Modern industrialization is also making a huge impact on global climate change. For example, the papermaking industry carries out deforestation (the removing of trees for paper manufacturing) on a very wide scale - in the U.S., papermaking industries remove almost a billion trees for this purpose every year. On top of that, the proportion of trees that are used to make paper on a global scale, which is eventually wasted, totals to over 5 trillion.

Now here's where a bit of math and biology comes into play. A healthy tree can absorb about 40 tonnes of CO2 in one year of its lifetime. By literally wasting 5 trillion of them, through wasting the paper that they make, we prevent the absorption of an extra 20,000,000,000,000 kilograms of CO2, in a single year.

This is not an exaggeration! Even a single adult human produces 2600 kilograms of CO2 in a year!

If we start taking all these massive numbers and the massive effects of global climate change deeply into consideration, it becomes really obvious that the argument "what can I do to save energy, I'm just one person" becomes baseless and valueless.

It is the responsibility of everyone (who is able to do so) to save energy to the best of their ability, and to spread its word as far as they can. If we all take time to contribute in the earth hour event, we can easily save way over 70 tonnes of CO2 in our local areas every Earth Hour event.