Lights went off around the world for 60 minutes on Saturday as people switched off for ' Earth Hour', a campaign to raise awareness about and force governments to act on global warming.


Up to 30 million people had switched off  by the time "Earth Hour"-  which started in Suva in Fiji and Christchurch in New Zealand -- had completed its cycle westward.

More than 380 towns and cities and 3,000 businesses in 35 countries signed up for the campaign that is in its second year after it began in 2007 in Sydney.

James Leape of WWF International which was running the campaign said:

"Earth Hour shows that everyday people are prepared to pull together to find a solution to climate change. It can be done,"

It is not so clear though that the damage we everyday people continue to inflict on the planet we live on can be so easilly undone.

Earth Hour clearly helps to  raise  awareness but the gesture has to be seen in context,  in China alone building projects around the country amount to the equivalent of a city the size of Geneva being built every month and the energy demands behind China's rapid economic development are staggering . The country's reliance on coal , a dependency that  also makes China the worlds number two polluter behind the US, is anything but energy efficient.

To aquire more energy to fuel its economic  development China wants to dam the five great rivers of Asia , the Yellow river, the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween and the great Brahmaputra.

This is the basic equation, the environment pays for economic growth and the costs are spiralling out of control.

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