Earth Day 2025 – Our Power, Our Planet

Earth Hour is an annual event organized by the World Wildlife Foundation to create a unifying moment to consider our planet and take steps to challenge our energy blindness by turning off all the lights. This year it took place on Saturday March 22nd.  Earth Hour in March is always followed by Earth Day in April. This year it falls on Tuesday April 22nd. 

In 2025, the theme for Earth Day is ‘Our Power, Our Planet’. Some of the areas the organisers cite as being important to this theme include: A push to switch to renewable energy sources to power or homes, businesses and vehicles. Investing in innovative solutions to provide more sustainable materials to fossil fuels. To honour this day, we at Common Earth have created an Earth Week Event, with a new power-related challenge every day between April 16 to April 22.

• Day 1 – List all the things you use today that require energy. Be as exhaustive as you can and try to consider all the energy required for each of those things to happen. Think about the energy needed to extract the raw materials, produce it, and deliver it to your home. Include items that you don’t plug in; things like clothes, food, cleaning products, furniture, etc. Identify as many ideas as possible for how you could reduce your energy consumption.
• Day 2 – Expand your understanding of Energy Return on Investment (EROI) and find examples of it. This is a way to measure how much energy is necessary to produce usable energy. Investigate the EROI of fossil fuels and the same for renewable energy. Consider the EROI of your food choices (hint the further up the food chain the more energy intensive it will invariably be). 
• Day 3 – Deepen your understanding of our collective energy blindness by watching this episode of The Great Simplification. As you watch it, make notes on what you learn and what you want to learn more about. After you finish, list 5 things that surprised you the most.  
• Day 4 – Review your electricity bill and see how you could reduce your energy consumption at home by at least 10%. Reconsider what you think of as necessary in an effort to help with this? 
• Day 5 – According to the International Energy Agency, a ChatGPT query requires roughly 10 times more energy than a Google search. Learn how to make better and more efficient queries for Chat GPT and for your online use more generally. 
• Day 6 – Explore this graph and related links. Notice how, despite the increase in the production of renewable energy, our use of fossil fuels has not decreased or flattened but in fact also increased. Why is our energy demand so insatiable? 
• Day 7 – Have a conversation about your activities and insights this week with 2 people in your network. This could be colleagues at work, friends or family. It could be online, but even better if it happens in person, or over a (plant-based) meal.