Last year I totally forgot to turn the lights off for Earth Hour. I was elbow deep in organising dinner for with two small kids and a handful of ring-ins and hubby, and well, I simply forgot.

This year I’m going to try a little harder to remember, because all in all I think it’s a good starting point, although the hypocrisy of only doing it for an hour grates, given our love of car use, big screen TVs and electronic entertainment in general.

If we compare like for like it’s certainly true that LCD flat screen TV’s consume less power than their CRT counterparts, so assuming you’ve recently replaced an old CRT screen with an LCD model of the same size you’re doing your bit for the environment.

Plasma screens on the other hand, which are the cheaper and therefore the more popular flat screen option, are power monsters; consuming roughly double the power of the same size LCD models.

But let’s face it – most Australian’s are who are buying flat screen TVs are buying plasma screens, and most of them are buying much larger screens than the CRT sets they are replacing.

So what’s the point of turning the lights off for an hour if you’ll spend approximately 4 hours per night for the rest of the year watching a power guzzling plasma screen?

And 4 hours is a conservative estimate – there’s a house I run past most mornings that has two huge screens on all night! As I jog past and I have to fight back fantasies of taking up a slingshot and putting an end to their selfishness.

Don’t even get me started on the hypocrisy of parents who buy big screens, hook them up to 24 hour cable TV channels, then send their kids to private schools feigning interest in their education.

The kids don’t need the big screens, we don’t need the big screens, and planet sure a heck doesn’t need the big screens.

This year I’ll try to remember to turn my lights off for an hour on March 31^st, a candle light dinner will be fun!

Better than that I’ll commit to not trading in my 21 inch CRT screen for a bigger flatter alternative, and try to pare back the amount of time it’s actually turned on by a few hours per week.

Now where did I put those matches?