Given the thousands of comments made here weekly, I’ve decided to add a new feature to WUWT: Quote of the Week. It will be posted on Sundays.
A commenter on WUWT summed up Earth Hour in a succinct way:
I will be thinking about the 1.8 billion people on Earth who have no access to electricity, and how insane they must think we are.
From commenter “007” on the WUWT Poll: What are you going to do for “Earth Hour”? thread.
Anyone that wants to submit a better feature logo that the simple one I cobbled together above is certainly welcome to do so. – Anthony
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From commenter “007″ (quote of the week):
“I will be thinking about the 1.8 billion people on Earth who have no access to electricity, and how insane they must think we are.”
Well, maybe more that we are insanely hypocritical, since the purpose of Earth Hour seems to be to reassure all those people without electricity that they really don’t need it because WE can do without it for a whole hour – GP
Why are you against people thinking about the consequences of their actions? Watt drives those here to be so critical of those who do not share their views?
And yes – I did turn off my lights – but with CFLs and LEDs etc through the house we had already cut our electricity bill substantially anyway (saving us about $500 a year). That $500 pays more than twice over the cost of using green power.
Try thinking of the consequences to the poor of this earth if the affluent countries cut world economic growth by a third to a half, as Stern proposes.
I like “Quote Vadis”, a variant of the Latin phrase meaning “Where are you going?”
DJ:
Let’s see, $500/12 = $41.67 per month.
My electric bill per month averages $52 and I pay one of the higher rates in the country – $.18/KWH.
Either you have your house lit up like a Christmas tree or your paying something like $1.00 per KWH.
Anyone that wants to submit a better feature logo that the simple one I cobbled together above is certainly welcome to do so.
Great idea for a new feature Anthony. My quote of the week on WUWT this week was:
Indiana Bones (09:53:32) :
To lose an appendage in the name of a falsified theory seems a rather unnecessary sacrifice. It is up to the sponsors at this point to pull the plug – get these poor souls off the ice and perhaps save three lives in the process.
I think I’ll design a logo for that prize if you hand one out weekly.
Isn’t that exactly what the quote pertains to?
Great Idea Anthony!
Looking fwd to the weekly quote!
DJ (12:45:31) :
Why are you against people thinking about the consequences of their actions? Watt drives those here to be so critical of those who do not share their views?
It’s called backlash. Get used to it because it is just getting started. As I have posted before, “the baby will be thrown out with the bathwater” as people get sick of being taxed & regulated for the non-problem of AGW. Society as a whole will catch on that AGW is just a political scam & all the good parts of environmentalism will be demonized along with AGW – and people who are really trying to do the right thing – such as yourself (& myself & Anthony , I believe) will be demonized too. That’s why truth in science and separation of science & politics is so important. I think that is the true goal of this blog.
Anthony
I’ve got a much better strapline
“Quote of the week”
$50000 prize-paid in cash
Tonyb
Good idea. There are several gems each week and it will be nice to be reminded of one of the best. The first pick was a good one.
If I might suggest, how about listing the 2-4 quotes you considered and then identify your final pick?
H.R. (15:31:12) :
If I might suggest, how about listing the 2-4 quotes you considered and then identify your final pick?
Maybe in a poll format.
” will be thinking about the 1.8 billion people on Earth who have no access to electricity, and how insane they must think we are.”
I was just wondering how they found out about Eath Hour.
That quote was an excellent choice—worth posting on the wall. The secret of prosperity is capitalism turned loose on resources, and the enabler is energy. The more energy, the more we can do.
There is no reason except hidebound political systems why all of the world cannot live at the level of the middle-class American, or better. When you consider that the entire Solar System is ripe for the taking, there is no physical limit to the resources we can develop, and no limit to the energy we can bring to bear, either.
The only limits are the self-imposed constraints on the human imagination, the kind of constraints that keep Islamist societies in feudal conditions, and the kind of constraints that nihilistic doomsayers and Luddites in the West wish to impose upon us.
/Mr Lynn
Good idea! But, why limit it to just one quote per week? Seems likely there might be weeks with several really good quotes.
Bruce
i celebrated earth hour by turning on every light that i have in my small apartment. I am usually good about just having lights on in the room that I am currently in but I decided to celebrate!
DJ “Why . . .”
Skeptics of AGW, as some of confess to being, must have a great sense of humor and a sense of irony. For example, those CFLs (aka pig-tail lights) are an example. I even have some. They are cute but they don’t light very well. They pause coming on. They take awhile to get to their ultimate brightness. They don’t fit everywhere. Cold temperatures may cause them to not come on at all. Oh, and if you break one you are supposed to open the doors and windows for 15 min. to air out the house. Did any clothing come in contact with the broken material – throw it away. And so on. Read the rest here: http://www.epa.gov/mercury/spills/
Then there is the CFCs of the ozone hole. This one was even more expensive. Now we learn it is a natural Earth-Sun-Solar system function and science and society can have another big side splitting laugh while we contemplate the consequences of our actions.
This post being about quotes, here are two:
“he used sarcasm to upset his opponent”;
“irony is wasted on the stupid”;
Johathan Swift
And another idea:
French wine withers on the vine
HEADLINE here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7969564.stm
And not a moment too soon. Think of all the CO2 produced by the little beasts of yeasts in facilitating fermentation. We’ll know the UN and its friends are serious about the connection between CO2 and AGW when they advocate complete cessation of beer, wine, spirits, cheese, and yogurt production. Stock up now!
Speaking of living without electricity, I did that during a lot of my childhood. I would not recommend it as a way of life. My father would get up a 5 in the morning to start the fire in the wood stove in the kitchen. Really the kitchen was the only warm place much of the time. For baths, water had to be heated on the stove and carried to the bath. Generally a bath would have 3 to 4 inches of water in the tub. One would hurry through it before the water became cool.
To flush a toilet, the water from the bucket would be poured in it. Luckily we were on a town supply of water so it would flow without electricity. If we had had a well, then we wouldn’t have had any pressurized water.
For lighting we had kerosene lamps and I still have a couple of them. Generally though it was early to bed, soon after sunset.
There was no radio or TV or any electrical appliance except an old hand crank telephone. I only remember the phone working once or twice early on and think it was disconnected after the first year or two there. There was a good library and other activities that kept us busy such as hauling up wood and splitting it, or going to the woods to cut down trees, or going berry picking and getting other wild foods. So overall it was enjoyable, more so for the kids than the adults.
Cooking on the wood stove is tricky and baking bread was particularly difficult. My mother never liked the wood stove. There was no refrigerator either, but buying ice kept a few things cold.
So overall, living without electricity is not pleasant. It is more like camping out all the time. I would recommend that people who support Earth Hour live 6 years without electricity and see how they enjoy it.
Why only $50,000? Anthony could offer a prize of one million dollars: click
@Urederra (15:55:41) :
“”H.R. (15:31:12) :
If I might suggest, how about listing the 2-4 quotes you considered and then identify your final pick?”
Maybe in a poll format.”
Nah… My vote is for ‘no polls’ ;o)
Posters already give props to good posts. Tabulating poll results is just another chore for which Anthony has no time, I’m willing to bet.
I only suggested including a few ‘finalists’ because in the course of a week there are several gems posted and it seems like choosing one best quote of the week would be tough. It would be nice to see the contenders from which Anthony makes his final pick.
How about a free polar bear rug for the yearly winner.
Do the quotes have to come from WUWT?
Daniel Hannan, MEP for South East England, recently said to Gordon Brown,(posted on ICECAP)
“You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt.”
The relevance is that both Brown and Obama are planning on funding the economic stimulus spending by taxing emissions.
You have that exactly backwards. If you need a “special day” to make you think about the consequences of your actions you are an idiot!
If you think turning off your lights for an hour has any useful benefit to the planet you are simply not in touch with reality.
As pointed out in other threads, the electrical generation stations had to keep their generation capacity on line anyway. The only thing it probably accomplished was making life difficult for the operators at your local power grid as they try to keep power/voltage stable as folks suddenly unload the grid and then re-load the grid.
It is a useless token gesture to make people feel good, so they can pat them selves on the back and feel superior to other people, but has no useful impact on the problem they are attempting to highlight.
In short it is a waste of time and energy, both human and electrical (not to mention the fossil energy used to generate it). If you tallied up all the electrical load expended advertising the event it, probably exceeded the energy “saved” during the event.
Larry
“DJ (12:45:31) :
Why are you against people thinking about the consequences of their actions? Watt drives those here to be so critical of those who do not share their views?
And yes – I did turn off my lights – but with CFLs and LEDs etc through the house we had already cut our electricity bill substantially anyway (saving us about $500 a year). That $500 pays more than twice over the cost of using green power.”
Did you get the power plants turned off too? 1 billion (clueless IMO) people in 80 countries, and the list keeps growing.