The amount of energy needed to provide the electricity demands of the average American for a lifetime is equivalent to around 67,000 gallons of gasoline. Try filling that up 300 million times at today's gas prices!*

The Earth Hour event involves turning off/dimming lights all around the world in order to bring attention to electricity consumption, which for most people is a quickly passing thought that comes once per month. It is not about money, in this case, it is about preserving the natural resources that we all depend upon to survive and to produce and power all of the things we have come to love: e.g. mobile phones, cars, YouTube, MySpace, etc.

The hour is currently in progress and will happen in each time zone between 8:00 and 9:00 PM (20:00 and 21:00) March 29 2008.

The goal of the event is not to "save the world" or produce a meaningful reduction in emissions. The goal is to raise awareness and get the "grid mentality" out of people's minds that electricity is limitless, cheap, safe and clean, and flows endlessly from some golden bowl in the sky (to use the words of James Aach and Jeff Goodell). Electrical energy is produced for us using finite fossil fuel resources. These fossil fuels also provide often unacceptable environmental destruction and distress on people from their extraction to their combustion in the power plant, both today and into the future.

The beauty of electricity, however, is that we have the option of placing these distresses far out of sight from the consuming populace by stringing wires hundreds of miles to carry the energy. This acts to perpetuate wasteful consumption and ignorance. The electricity industry learned this years ago and has been operating it this way for decades.

No freedom is lost from the move away from fossil energy. It is a fact that the one big thing to be gained is freedom. Freedom from faceless greed, freedom from war over resources, and freedom from being consumed by our own consumption.

The event has received much criticism, mainly from people who do not understand it. The number "not participating" on the Facebook social network outnumbers those participating by a factor of three.

* Yes, I am very much aware that gasoline is not used to produce commercial electric power. The use of gasoline in this comparison was to produce something that the average person could visualize. Very much attention goes to gasoline as it is a tangible substance that everyone is familiar with and we now pay a lot more money for it than we used to. Not so many people can visualize a kilowatt-hour, and most people don't know the different between kilowatts and kilowatt-hours. So gasoline works as a very nice comparison.