Earth Hour 2008

by Red Ant on Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Last March, Sydney had an event called Earth Hour. This involved getting everyone to turn their lights off for an hour, to see how far we could reduce energy consumption. Street lights were kept on for safety, but it was quite surreal to look out and see everyone start turning lights off. It certainly made you think about how many lights and appliances you leave on, just because it is inconvenient to turn them off.

Well, it was a great success and Sydney ended up saving about 25 tonnes of CO2 emissions. This year, it’s become a global event. At 8pm on the 29 March 2008, hopefully millions of people in different cities around the world are going to turn their lights off.

On Friday morning we helped launch a small part of Earth Hour 2008: www.earthhour.org

Working with Leo Burnett, we created the site in Rails, with Radiant for content management. There is quite a lot of flash video, so we used Lighttpd for better performance for streaming FLV video, with the rest of the site on several Mongrel webservers.