San Francisco goes dark.

The city of San Francisco is leading on a number of environmental fronts. If you read this blog last week, you probably heard that the city's not buying bottled water any longer. Instead it's aiming to get people drinking out of the tap. (One of our favorite stats from that NBC Anne Thompson story: fill a single-serving
 water bottle with oil, and that's how much fossil fuel it takes to produce and ship -- yipes.)

Last week, San Francisco did something else to shrink its environmental impact: it went dark. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; San Francisco got the idea from Sydney, Australia. How about trying to get your town to dim down at night and let a little pressure off the beleaguered planet?