Events like Earth Hour do not need corporate partners. For what purpose? The whole point of the event is to turn lights off to get world-wide notice from those who make decisions on how to fight climate change and save the environment. Yet the main sponsor of Earth Hour, Wells Fargo Bank, as you can see from Earth Hour’s website where they were prominently advertised, did not even participate in Earth Hour. At least not in my city. (If there are reports out there anywhere that Wells Fargo participated in the event it was sponsoring, I’d like to see them.) With corporate sponsors like this, who needs deniers:

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The whole point of Earth Hour was to turn off lights to generate awareness about global warming and how we waste energy, but its corporate sponsor couldn’t manage to do that. These photos were taken in central Minnesota at two Wells Fargo locations during Earth Hour. Yeah — the corporate sponsor of Earth Hour couldn’t even manage to shut down for one single hour.

Not everyone was enamored of the idea of turning off light bulbs only to Twitter like mad about the darkness.  If you used your phone to Twitter about Earth Hour, you still probably charged up its battery using electricity, often from coal plants, which are killing our environment.  Every little thing we do leaves a carbon footprint, which is a fact that Earth Hour tends to de-stress.   And by the way, let’s turn off Facebook and Twitter next year for an hour.  And let’s also ask people to turn their heat off for an hour and not drive around.   Next year, let’s shut down a coal plant during Earth Hour. That’ll get the media’s attention, and it would be a meaningful Earth Hour, for a change.

Someone not so turned on by turning off the lights:

One of many was Ben Ross.  He wrote:

“The past decade has ushered an unprecedented interest in environmentalism.   We now have hybrid cars, solar power heating, even eco-friendly picture frames.  Earth Hour aims to “symbolize” that “each of us can make a positive impact,” and symbolize is exactly what it does.  It is symbolic of the bumper-sticker environmentalism which has swept over the world, blinds us from the true causes of environmental degradation, and makes a farce out of the entire movement.”

I’m not totally sure of his sentiments about global warming, but I know that we need more than yearly feel-good stunts to “raise awareness”.

Two of my comments there were these:

“I didn’t boycott Earth Hour, but I did take photos of the two local Wells Fargo banks in my city and they were both ablaze with lights and open for business.  Why is that interesting?  Because Wells Fargo was an official partner/corporate sponsor of Earth Hour. And somehow they did it with all their lights on when the whole point of [...]