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New York City's Empire State Building is scheduled to go dark for one hour Saturday night.
So are the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza and many other iconic structures.The lights will be going out for Earth Hour, organized by the World Wildlife Fund to draw attention to global warming, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. Saturday local time around the world. That's when organizers of the event, which began in Sydney in 2007, want everyone to turn off non-essential lights.
About 2,800 cities in 83 countries — including 250 in the United States — had signed up, according to Dan Forman, a spokesman for World Wildlife Fund, an international conservation organization that boasts 1.2 million national members and close to 5 million globally.
Nuke generating plants can't be turned off at the flick of a switch (which is why _large_ users need to warn the operators when switching on or off). Even as much as a well looked at football game can cause spikes in usage (get a break, and half the user run to the fridge, flip on the light in the toilet, ...).
Since it's announced it means that the operators will have little choice to anticipate a dip in consumption and hence reduce the amount of nuclear power in their generating mix, causing more fossile fuel to be used for a much longer period than that one hour.
Since fossil fuel usage causes more C02 and H2O to be released (vs. none extra from a nuclear plant), this action effectively will increase the amount of green house gasses generated instead of decrease it in any country that uses a high amount of nuclear generated electricity.
People should be turning most of everything off when it is not needed.
