![\"Earth](\"http:\/\/vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/earthhour.jpg\")
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It’s been a pretty busy week… mostly to do with climate change and the environment. Did you participate in Earth Hour<\/a>? The global campaign to turn off anything electric for one hour, yes that’s right, only one hour…. could you do it? did you do it? I hope you didn’t make any excuses. My friends and I ended up sitting in the dark (well, we did light some candles) for almost 3 hours eating our spaghetti and having a good ol’ time chatting and, at times, having pretty intense conversations about the state of the environment, our planet, and what (if any) ways we can lower our ecological footprint<\/a>.<\/p>\n There were a lot of excuses out there… one was that some French weirdos actually said that it was a bad idea because if we all turned our lights off for an hour and then turned them all on at once after the hour was over, it would override circuits and blow electrical grids. Well, there might be some truth to it, but I think that most electrical companies can handle surges in power. It’s usually OVERUSE of energy that blows grids… for example, when people in NYC and Northeastern part of the US\/Canada turn their aircons on during a summer heatwave… definitely circuits will blow, but I don’t think millions of people would have turned on all their electrical appliances even ones they don’t usually use all at once… I think its this kind of thinking that stops people from doing anything about their impact on the environment. HEY, if people can’t turn off their computers, tvs, lights, etc. off even for only one hour, I think there is something seriously wrong with our society. And that’s right up there with people who go on vacation with their laptops, blackberries, and other work-related gadgets…<\/p>\n (how did you celebrate your April Fools?)<\/p>\n Speaking of which, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change<\/a> just finished up their conference in Bangkok today. This conference follows the Bali conference last year to look at how governments and others can develop solutions to address climate change. An interesting conference on a topic I’m passionate about, but I didn’t get a chance to sit in on any of the sessions. But I assume it’s like any other UN conference… a lot of talk and negotiating, but not much really comes out of it. In my experience it’s really what happens after conferences that really determines if things will change.<\/p>\n It also sounds like China is taking some steps to reduce the use of plastic bags<\/a>. This is the kind of government policy that needs to be used to get people to change their unsustainable habits. Even with all the issues of China political stance and view on human rights, at times their style of implementing overarching policies for the benefit of its society can and does work… Maybe all the opponents to China is because they aren’t use to alternative policy measures to typical “western” ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been a pretty busy week… mostly to do with climate change and the environment. Did you participate in Earth Hour? The global campaign to turn off anything electric for one hour, yes that’s right, only one hour…. could you do it? did you do it? I hope you didn’t make any excuses. My friends … Continue reading What did you do this week?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":343,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[124],"tags":[3,125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2002,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions\/2002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/hoaxmuseumimages\/aprilfool_banner.jpg\")
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