The Golden Gate Bridge, City Hall, Alcatraz and other parts of the city will go almost completely dark for an hour next month as part of a campaign to conserve energy and fight global warming.

Organizers of Lights Out San Francisco are asking city residents and businesses to install energy-efficient bulbs and turn off all unnecessary lights for an hour on the night of Oct. 20, a Saturday. The goal is to save 15 percent of the electricity consumed on an average Saturday night.

In the next month, the campaign will give away more than 100,000 compact fluorescent light bulbs, donated by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Yahoo Inc., in an effort to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and teach about energy conservation.

MEOW stands for ?Moral Equivalent of War?, Jimmy Carter?s ineffective rhetoric advancing his energy policy program, which, not so incidentally, was a complete failure. Carter?s energy policy blocked the markets from adjusting, making medium problems into huge ones. Reagan swept out the most draconian element of Carter?s plan when he deregulated crude oil on his 8th day at work. Oil prices fell, silencing (for a minute) even Ed Markey. By the end of Reagan?s first term, all of MEOW had been repealed or rendered moot.

Today, we are bombarded with messages to save energy or we will kill the planet. Campaigns to give away energy efficient products are welcome, a good idea liberals and conservatives can both applaud.

Turning off the lights on a national treasure, though, is not a good idea. It is a kind of intellectual and emotional theft, actually. The Golden Gate bridge is a symbol of American accomplishment in engineering and in art deco design. It is a shrine to mobility as freedom.

Some want to convert it into a doomsday clock.