Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Cinq minutes pour la terre



Tomorrow in France, all the citizens are being asked to turn off all their electricity between 7.55 pm and 8 pm, the reason being that:

a) the new Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change by the United Nations (I’m translating this, so this could be a bit of a dodgy translation) is being presented in Paris;

b) to show the presidential candidates of the forthcoming elections that Climate Change should be a subject of governmental debate.

The Eiffel Tower is going to be turned off (it sparkles every hour once it gets dark for ten minutes) and a number of other Mairies (town halls) are participating in various ways as well. I’ll let you know how it went, and you can join in too if you want.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Verillon, I think that it's a marvelous gift to mother nature. I only wish we could organise something similar in the states. Of course, Mr. Bush (Mr. Oil) is in the White House, so my government is not going to do anything for the environment.

I'm glad a country (any country) finally took the initiative to show the world that they care about the environment.

I watched the lights of Paris dim this afternoon, on the tele. :-)

Unknown said...

Hey Jefferson, well it was actually a Friends of the Earth initiative (if truth be told), but quite a few institutions joined in, mairies, churches, the tower was switched off and I sat in candlelight for five minutes and then turned on the tv straigh after to see the newsreport (shakes head), which was quite propably shorter than the whole event itself.

As for Government involvement, don't be too hard on the old US of A, there are a lot of city councils that are ratifying the Kyoto Treaty regardless of Bush's stance and then there are a lot of countries that have ratified that are making superficial efforts at making changes.

Marie said...

I think it's a great idea.

Unknown said...

I had a load of emails promoting this.
I think everyone should have one evening a week powered by candle - we could all do with the rest!

Unknown said...

Then Hen House did indeed join in having been alerted by Friends of the Earth. For five minutes we sat silently in the gloom pondering humanity and then we fell off our chairs and rolled around on the floor laughing helplessly...

Unknown said...

Yep the candlelight was cool. Apparently it was 3.5 million who took part here. When shall we do it next then?

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