Earth Hour 2017: Posting one less tweet and minor lifestyle changes can help you fight climate change beyond that hour

Earth Hour, the largest social movement against Climate change is all set for 25 March 2017. It will be celebrated all over the world for 1 hour from 8:30 PM to 9:30 PM at local time of the countries. According to WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature), the organisation that organises the movement started it in 2007 in Sydney, Australia where 2.2 million people turned off electricity for an hour. The movement spread to 88 countries and territories in 2009 breaking all the records for mass participation growing to 152 countries and territories in 2012.

Image Credit: WWF

According to a report released by WWF a staggering 178 countries and territories took part in the movement last year. About more than 12,700 landmarks and monuments switched off their lights to mark the symbolic need about fighting climate change and stopping the wastage of resources. The report highlights the need to reflect and convert the words into a concrete action against climate change that go beyond the 60 minutes every year.

WWF is holding two signature events in India to coincide with Earth Hour 2017. The first event “One Planet Cities Pedalathon’ will be held in Chamundeshwari Stadium, Bengaluru to promote sustainable mobility. Prominent buildings like Rashtrapati Bhawan, India Gate, Akshardham Temple in Delhi, Charminar and Golconda Fort in Hyderabad are some of the important monuments in India that turn off the lights to mark the occasion. WWF has also teamed up with BSES to urge Delhites to support Earth Hour. The capital saved about 229 MW of electricity last year during Earth Hour.

Image Credit: WWF

 

However, despite all the good intentions the 60 minutes represents each year, we need to move beyond the 60 minutes for a larger change in lifestyle to fight climate change. One thing to point here is that this does not include using dark or black colour backgrounds on the system. Google debunked the hoax going around on the internet about how changing Google to black will reduce the power consumption across the world. The company conducted a research and pointed out that 75 percent of the screen in the market are LCD based which would instead use more power to change the screen colour to black.

Changing things to black colour would actually make a difference if all the display panels that we use used were AMOLED display. The reason behind that would be because AMOLED screens turn off the power to pixels when displaying the black colours. Another thing, no matter how insane, would be to Tweet less.

Tweet less? Well what if I told you that reducing the number of tweets by just one will help you reduce Twitter’s carbon footprint by more than 3,650 metric tonne CO2 every year. Fast Company did some calculation back in 2010 where it took about 100 joules of energy to make one tweet which translates to about 0.02 grams of CO2 emissions.

Image: Twitter

Twitter users tweeted about 50 million tweets every day back in 2010 but now that number has increased to 500 million every day which makes it to 10 metric tonne CO2. The more amusing part is that these calculations only take into account the CO2 produced by Twitter servers and not any third part services like apps or websites that use the Twitter API. So, reducing two tweets every day will save about 7,300 metric tonne of CO2.

Image Credit: Google

Google is no better, as the amount of energy used in one search is equal to turning a 60W light bulb for a full 17 seconds. Internet users conduct about 3.5 billion Google searches per day which translates to about 44 million watts. The same report points that YouTube can stream video for 3 days in the energy that requires to make, package and deliver a standard DVD and one minute of streaming YouTube video consumes about 0.0002kWh of energy which amounts to the energy that a human body uses in 8 seconds. Well I am not going all Matrix here, but yes that is what the numbers point out. One thing to note here is that Google has been investing in renewable energy sources and way to optimise energy consumption to balance out their carbon footprint.

Image Credit: WWF

So to conclude, making general changes to your life choice that include shutting down your computer or electronics when not in use, tweeting less (as outrageous as it may sound), searching less obvious things in Google and reducing YouTube streaming time by disabling auto advance, can result in some change rather than any wild party that one may throw to ‘celebrate’ earth hour.

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from http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/earth-hour-2017-posting-one-less-tweet-and-minor-lifestyle-changes-can-help-you-fight-climate-change-beyond-that-hour-368644.html