Add Vancity honcho Dave Mowat's name to the growing list of CEOs who are blogging. And if you head to his blog, you'll notice two things.

One, it's not on the Vancity site. Instead, it's on ChangeEverything.ca, where he's helping to contribute to the conversations there.

And two, it's not your usual CEO blog. No griping about the travails of first-class air travel or hand-wringing about how hard it is to lay people off.

Instead, he's blogging about climate change. Mowat has taken Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth training, and will be delivering the presentation to audiences starting next month. He admits he's a little nervous:

I’m not Gore. I’m not a scientist. I’m just a business leader and a person who has access to a lot of people and an opportunity to make people think and maybe even change their behaviour. But I’m preparing, and I’m rehearsing and I’m getting ready to take on this huge challenge I signed up for.

Not to go over the top here, but I do feel like we’re all standing on the edge of a new day here and are looking out at what could be a new future. The decisions we make over the next few months and years can determine how future generations live. It can change history . . .

Best not get ahead of myself here. First, let’s get through a rehearsal.

Two of the community members have already engaged him in the comment threads. I expect they'll be the first of many. And while we didn't exactly have the CEO in mind when we were conceiving of the typical ChangeEverything.ca user back in 2006, it's great to see how well he fits in.

We'll be switching off the site for five minutes at 10:55 Pacific Time today. Here's why:

There's this French initiative that has caught on well beyond the country's borders: turning off our lights for five minutes in the evening on Thursday, February 1st. (That's 10:55 am to 11:00 am our time here in B.C.)

It's meant to draw attention for the need for action on climate change:

Why February 1st? Because the next day, in Paris, the latest report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be released. This event will take place in France; we can't pass up this opportunity to focus attention on the urgency of the global climate situation. (my translation)

The idea has taken hold, passed along on blogs and email lists around the world. The idea isn't to save the world by reducing energy consumption by a tiny amount (although, hey, every bit helps) – it's to raise awareness and signal just how broad support is for urgent, coordinated action.

At a time when even the Harper Conservatives are realizing they need to make some changes, this is an opportunity to push the powers that be all the harder. So vote with your fingers: switch off the lights, shut down your laptops, turn off the radio... and let's find out just how much power there can be in powering down.

 Update at 11:01 am: And we're back!