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Lights Out America began on October 20th in San Francisco with many cities throughout America soon following suit. This year Lights Out America is joining forces with Earth Hour in its second annual global lights-out campaign.

The lights go out from 8:30pm-9:30pm your local time on March 29th 2009.

This year Earth Hour will symbolize a vote for a healthy earth. "For the first time in history, people of all ages, nationalities, race and background have the opportunity to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming."

So far, over 1400 cities and towns in over 80 countries have committed to participate in Earth Hour. Check out the video below:

Today, Sunday March 8th, at 2am the clocks jumped forward one hour from Standard Time to Daylight Savings Time. This gives you more daylight in the afternoon and evening and less of it in the morning.

Some argue that Daylight Saving Time allows people to enjoy more leisure activities because there is more sunlight following work hours. For example, the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett conceived DST in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day. As an avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. This is when he came up with the solution to advance the clock during the summer months allowing for more outdoor time.

Others argue that DST is a way for the government to control people because the more daylight there is the longer people cam work - especially laborers such as filed workers. Robertson Davies called it, "the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." Some have dubbed it "Daylight Slaving Time".

There are benefits for the economy, though, as people have more time to shop, attend sporting events, and generally enjoy more time outside of the home, which generally leads to increased spending.

Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Nation) and Hawaii and the territories of Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa are the only places in the U.S. that do not observe DST but instead stay on "standard time" all year long.