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ANOTHER LIFE:IN MY CHILDHOOD, we listened to the wireless – that cosy old word – by the overhead light of one 60-watt bulb. Today, we watch television in a room with some 300 watts glowing around the walls. Tonight at 8.30, however, our windows will be darkened for Earth Hour, in common, it’s hoped, with millions of other homes and public buildings as the world spins into dusk. If the weather’s right, people in more than 1,000 participating cities could be offered an uncommon revelation of stars, writes MICHAEL VINEY

Earth Hour is a call for action on global warming, something to set against those pictures from space of the lit-up world at night, beautiful but ghastly in its glittering decadence, like Damien Hirst’s diamond-crusted skull. But even as climate change precipitates such gestures, humanity’s other big crisis – the collapse of free-market capitalism – is locking us further into disaster. With conjured billions, governments are propping up the biggest cause of climate change: the dogma of endless economic growth.