I have a confession to make. Without signing up, without doing anything major to signify my participation, I joined what I hoped was millions of folks taking a stand against wasting energy by turning off my lights for an hour beginning at 8 pm on 3/29. My kids were in bed, my wife was out of town, so I only needed to convince the dog, who is blind. I clicked the lights off and began thinking about our consumption of energy.

This was not an easy process. There are lights all over your house, and I decided to personally interpret the rules to mean not doing much else, like watching TV, endlessly checking my email, and noodling on the web. I know I missed some lights as well. There are night lights in the kids' rooms, and one at the top of the stairs. My son wasn't quite asleep yet, so the light on the landing outside his door remained lit. I realized afterwards that I didn't flick off the motion sensor light in front of our house, so it's possible a deer or fox triggered the light for a bit.

Earth Hour was begun last year on 3/31 by the World Wildlife Fund in Sydney, Australia. This year, it spread across the globe, including major cities around the globe and throughout the United States.

As I sat in the silent dark, I felt pretty proud. I am constantly shutting off lights in our house. My son likes to turn them on, and the previous owner was a real zealot about adequate lighting, so there isn't an unlit corner to be found. We've been in the house for less than a year, so we're waiting for attrition to claim the old bulbs and slowly replacing them with compact florescent bulbs. So this will really help, I thought, and millions of us doing it will be something.

I wasn't slipping. I maintain my skepticism of direct action and feel-good maneuvers (even in the dark) that don't really mean anything. But it just seemed like, well, if people just turned off lights they weren't using, really made a conscious effort to do that, it could be great, right?

Wrong, I'm afraid. Or at least preliminary data from around Australia, where Earth Hour had a one-year head start, would indicate that assumption was wrong. A blog called Scientia potentia est, which could be the rantings of an Australian scientist/madman for all I know, does have some convincing data (via Freakonomics) that shows people increasing their consumption of energy in advance of Earth Hour. They were preparing to save energy by expending more energy.

This is tremendously depressing. I don't know if data is available in the states, because it belies a transparency we've effectively killed off in the post-9/11 era. But I have to admit it deals a blow to the gentle, non-malicious sense of satisfaction I had sitting in the dark last week. Sigh.