Earth Equity News

Lights Out Activists on Anti-Neon Crusade in France. By Adam Sage, TimesOnLine (UK), November 8, 2008. "Meet Le Clan du Néon, an increasingly popular environmental movement that wants to make the City of Lights a little darker. One tactic is to turn off neon shop signs at night by reaching the external fire switches that control them, usually found two or three metres up the façade... Le Clan was set up in Paris, but its light-hearted and low-tech activist approach to ecology has been a hit across the country with students, many of whom see the antineon activity as a nocturnal lark. Groups have sprung up in Normandy, Bordeaux, the Alps and Dordogne. Members from the latter have posted an internet video that says that in a region bereft of night life, turning out the high street lighting is as good a way of passing the time as any... The thousands of shop signs left on at night in Europe consume tens of gigawatt hours of electricity a year. In France, where the nuclear industry supplies 80 per cent of electricity, the result is more radioactive waste. Elsewhere, it is hundreds of tonnes of CO2 emissions. 'If all the neon signs in the world were turned off, the impact on global warming would be very significant,' said Nicolas, 28, another Le Clan member. 'There ought to be a law against it, but since there isn't, we have to go around doing it ourselves.'"