Matt,
This HAH event is more than a sarcastic response to Earth Hour, it is a backlash against the energy conservation movement, indicating the general ineffectiveness of the movement itself. Earth Hour's premise of turning out the lights, while symbolically important, is a non-starter for effective climate change mitigation. We would have to turn out all the lights to stop climate change, and the opposition knows this.
Earth Hour reinforces the fossil fuel industries' insistence that Greens want to turn the lights out on an economy that was built on intense energy use. It empowers Coal's famous phrase "We keep the lights on."
If we don't roll back such ineffective symbolism in favor of real solutions, we risk the legitimacy of the movement itself.
For example, during Earth Hour, any building powered by renewable energy sources should be allowed to turn on ALL their lights, as a beacon, a symbol that we want to turn off dirty energy and turn on a new energy future. That would be encouraging.
Until the Green movement wakes up to this backlash, through hints like HAH, our path will only get steeper.

Fools' Bones (A Poem):

One day, very soon,
Individuals everywhere will awaken
To a nation lost to dogma.

Self-righteous scientists shred data
And take party to sideline peer review.
Fudged linear analysis models are brazenly offered.

Green jobs are pushed.
A thousand new taxes enacted.
While polar bears smile for the camera.

Ignorance takes center stage.
Fear and envy of the achievers runs amok.
An inverted morality is sold to the public.

Sometimes it gets very cold.
And at other times it is hot.
Either way, we got them by the short hairs.

Craft a world-wide disinformation campaign.
Package it with emotional appeal.
They will swallow it, so many road apples.

Rock stars and Hollywood actors are its cheerleaders.
The general public lines up for the kool-aid.
Here are your tools.

I had a small Earth hour fail myself
http://theregjoe.blogspot.com/2011/03/outlook-print-fail.html

Earth Hour is no more than a consciousness-raising exercise and if one considers the effects it might have on electricity markets (lower demand means utilities/generators lower prices in hopes of recouping lost revenue which increases electricity use which defeats Earth Hour). But "Human Achievement Hour" is more like "Hubris Hour" where we are asked to celebrate using things rather than any higher purpose. And some will argue over AGW, as if that matters, rather than looking at the many opportunities for innovation. That's the real FAIL.

Although the libertarian thing is a farce too, your rhetoric of "any kind of concern about the state of the planet" does not logically connect with Earth Hour -- even a cursory look at the journals will uncover many very reliable and "concerned with the planet" studies showing how conservation is overwhelmingly a bad strategy. For example, when consumption drops, so does the computer-computed price per kilowatt of electricity, triggering the computer-monitors of said price invoking a burst in industrial activity to capitalize on the reduced production costs. Last Earth Hour the official site reporting the real-time electricity consumption for the province of Ontario confirmed this, there is an initial drop followed by a massive surge that takes up the slack.

so one must ask, if you are 'saving' electricity, for whom are you saving it? industrial profiteers?

to return to the Science, there is ample evidence all over the planet and across many disciplines telling us there is nothing wrong with our use of energy per se -- and let's be clear here folks, the Laws of Thermodynamics ensure we cannot 'consume' energy, we can only transmute it -- the problem, for the Earth Conscious But Scientifically Aware People, is not the amount of power we transmute but the cleanliness of the sources (and sinks) of that power and, by lulling the consumer into a false belief they are actually doing something good for the Earth, that is where Earth Hour is one big FAIL.

I will be shining all my incandescent lights during this hour in celebration of Human Achievement Hour. The fight against the politicization of (bad) science never ends and is never in vain. Piltdown Man was eventually exposed. So will AGW.