I thought this essay deserved a wider audience. I have added some paragraphing to aid readability but changed not a word. Reprinted with permission.
– John A
The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. – Ross McKitrick
Earth Hour: A Dissent
by Ross McKitrick
In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour.
Here is my response.
I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.
Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.
Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water.
Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases.
Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.
The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity.
Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity.
People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.
I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.
Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering, our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry and the power supply.
If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations.
No thanks.
I like visiting nature but I don’t want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.
Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics
University of Guelph
h/t to the Bishop Hill blog for bringing this essay to my attention
John A says:
March 17, 2011 at 7:25 am
Why not switch off everything for a whole day? Why not show real solidarity with the third world by sharing their energy poverty?
Sanctimonious is right>>>
Because “Earth Day” isn’t about sympathy for the third world, it is about sticking a guilt trip on the first world for being the first world. I’ll no more show solidarity with the 3rd world by sharing their energy poverty than I will by sharing their dictatorships, theocracies, tribal warfare, religious warfare, ethnic cleansing, disregard for human rights, corrupt governments, corrupt police forces, corrupt armies and…gotta go to work, the list is to long to type up in one day.
I have been trying for a couple of years to get the dumb-as-rocks Republican Party leadership to articulate a plan for a New Industrial Revolution and attack what amounts to Obama’s New New Deal. No vision. Play it safe. If the myopic ‘leaders’ don’t do something they and America will be left in the dustbin of history.
My hope always comes back to the people. Something along the lines of the Tea Party might get us on track. We have to drag our leaders along and force them to do the right thing. Later on they will take credit for it.
This essay will help give more people the tools they need to make the case for an energy rich future. I use this soundbite: Which future do you want? Little House on the Prairie, or Star Trek? In my slide presentation, I show a replica of the actual Little House. It’s a one room log house, smaller than a one-car garage. Very rustic.
The California Energy Commission thinks energy is evil, and we should all use as little of it as possible. I have said energy is essential to support a population of almost 7 billion people. Without abundant energy, the planet will be depopulated. Perhaps starvation will be the main factor. However, if disease becomes part of that process, all bets are off. There may be little ability to stop things like plague, cholera, typhus. People may become desperate and start killing each other. In that case, we are looking at a new dark age.
Whoever are pulling the poltical strings behind the scenes are playing a dangerous game. Do they want to recreate some sort of feudal society in which only a few are left at the top to run everything? That strategy will destroy western civilization. The comforts of life will go away. It takes a complex structure to educate a population, maintain services, and innovate. Great innovations are not planned by a centralized authority. Ideas pop up in a chaotic process. It takes a fertile society for innovation to be successful. Centralized command and control governments don’t allow innovation to occur efficiently. The control stifles the creativity. Creativity requires freedom of thought, which challenges the controlling authority.
The socialist left-dominated world media are demonizing nuclear energy. They are spreading propaganda, serving a master that wants to scare people away from cheap abundant energy. Nuclear energy has the potential to free people for centuries. The availability of energy will give us choices we otherwise would not have. Nuclear energy can give us 100% energy independence and allow us to avoid wars over petroleum. We don’t want to be in the position of Japan during WWII with supplies cut off. Our adversaries might not be as kind to us as we were after the war to help rebuild and free the nations we defeated.
I hope there is some debate over events in Japan and we move beyond the current wave of hysteria. Integral Fast Reactors, perhaps LFTRs, are not capable of meltdowns. They should be a total game-changer. Our efforts should go into building new natural gas generation capacity for the short term, and move toward IFRs as soon as the technology can be commercialized. We may also want to build more reactors using the Areva model until IFRs can be built.
Compare these numbers: To replace California’s energy needs just in electricity with wind power, we would have to construct 100,000 1.5 MW wind turbines on 25,000 square miles of land (actually at sea, since there is not enough land with the required winds available). To replace CA’s electricity with nuclear power would require 24 San Onofre plants requiring an area of 3 square miles. The nuclear plants would have better than a 90% capacity factor, running 24/7/365. With wind, you take your chances getting anything, with an average capacity factor of 30-35% (being generous).
Then we get to costs – suffice it to say we can’t afford the bill for wind power. And the high cost of green energy isn’t just money, it’s also freedom and privacy.
Thank you Dr McKittrick, this essay effectively distills my opinion of the earth hour and earth day nonsense. Not enough people realize this is the best civilization to date, and the activists and opponents of development are like termites in a house, who undermine and weaken the foundation of our bountiful society, which is our access to efficient and relatively cheap energy.
The comment above (Barry Woods) that references Pachauri indicates he is such a termite, doing his best to bring down the house of modern civilization, and also indicates his ignorance of the extent of human influence on earth’s systems, by suggesting that human actions cause tsunamis.
Pachauri:
“Human actions are interfering with the delicate balance of nature,” he added. “Floods, heat waves, water scarcity, tsunamis will become frequent in the future. The impact on agriculture and healthcare will be enormous. The world will be forced to take care of more and more climate refugees in the very near future.”
http://web.amrita.edu/news/news-content.php?id=7&ct=10
Pachauri is not a wise man, more likely a venal political hack, and his opinion on human influence on the climate is probably about the same value as his opinion on the cause of tsunamis.
Professor McKittrick has nailed it.
I existed without electricity for long periods on remote sheep stations; it was hard, dirty work without much respite. Kerosine (Parafin) Coleman patent lanterns to be filled and kept clean, feeding twelve of us from a wood-fired stove which had to be lit around 3.30 in the morning to produce an early-morning cuppa, chopping the firewood, a meat safe outside the kitchen thick with blowflies on the outside of its fine steel mesh ventilator, constantly feeding that damned stove with lengths of wood to get the three-course evening meal cooked and to ensure there was enough hot water in the over-sized hot water tank from the wet-back on the stove to wash dishes and allow everyone to shower before bed. The only positive was the entertainment which we made ourselves, mostly telling tall stories, someone always had a guitar, which helped, but no reading and no radio unless a supply of batteries had been laid in. Personal computers, cellphones, television etc were not even a dream then; in case of emergencies there was an ancient hand-cranked Ericsson telephone in the kitchen, connected to the outside world with fencing wire transmission lines strung on tall wooden poles beside the access track all the way to the gravel road past the property.
Earth Hour is beyond stupid. It probably seems fine to the Greenies who live in cities and go camping every year to ‘get away from it all’ but take all their electro-goodies with them ‘to get back to nature’.
Our suburban London will no doubt celebrate it as we have done in the past – by completely ignoring it.
Right on the money!
Germany’s Der Spiegel has a very good article on line in English:
Germany’s Eco-Trap
Is Environmentalism Really Working?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,751469,00.html
Well said, Professor.
Peter Kovachev said,
I’d assemble a big, 100 Watt incandescent bulb-lit sign reading “Happy Earth Hour !”
LOL!!
Makes me wonder how many millions of unlit Happy Earth Hour signs there were last year; we just couldn’t see them in the dark.
I convinced a local parish priest to turn ON the lights of the church in our neighbourhood. It was a beautiful site to see all the stained glass in a backdrop of black.
When all the greenies and green-bots went into darkness, my house was fully illuminated 127 light bulbs in all, with my F250 idling while illuminated in my driveway, AND my generator and my snow blower were both running making a huge racket.
I kind of ruined the whole effect in my neighbourhood. The green-bot now think little of me but I am under no obligation to join their BS religion….sanctioned by our city no less.
So I say, illuminate pockets of our neighbourhood for life and liberty, and leave the culture of death and the greenies in their primitive darkness.
PW
What a load of rubbish. Completly misses the point of Earth Hour
It is about humanities massive wasting of energy. We only have a finite amout that we can comfortably produce at any given moment, without causing problems.
I am a big fan of WUWT, but you really need to be more careful with the content you post here. This comes off as a rant that as I said totally misses the point of Earth Hour and under mines the credability of WUWT.
JOJO
REPLY: Well, you are certainly entitled to that opinion, but I stand behind and support Dr. McKitrick’s essay, Earth Hour is nothing but a pointless feel good exercise in hype, and I’ve said so before.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/27/2010-earth-hour-in-california-just-as-ineffective-as-last-year/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/27/earth-hour-in-north-korea-a-stunning-success/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/27/tracking-earth-hour-in-the-greenest-state/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/29/earth-hour-in-california-success-or-bust-the-caiso-power-graph-tells-the-story/
May I suggest that you go to your main A/C breaker box on your home/office and pull the main switch? Live without electricity for a week, like many of the world’s poor, then let us know how that works out for you. – Anthony
I saw the caption of a New Yorker cartoon with two cavemen talking to each other:
“Something’s just not right–our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past thirty.”
The Earth Hour proponents seem to take the benefits of electricity for granted and then focus totally on the negatives. I agree with the good doctor, the act of cutting off some of your power use for an hour is useless and hypocritical.
My sentiments exactly.
If they want to do ‘earth hour’ then they really need to forgo everything electricity made possible as well. So they should really should just stand outside in a tattered loin clothe.
This essay by Dr McKitrick reminds me of the book “The Evolution Man, or How I Ate My Father” by author Roy Lewis (“Pourquoi j’ai mangé mon père” in French) where the Earth Hour supporters are the hypocritical ones like Uncle ‘Back to the trees!’ Vanya of this very funny and prehistoric story.
An excellent essay, thanks.
Wonder if Al Gore will turn off a few lights.
Supporting McKitrick’s article is the corresponding increased use of transport fuel.
Tad W. Patzek shows rapid growth of fossil fuel drove the US economy during the last century.
Fig. 7 “Exponential rate of growth of world crude oil production was 6.6% per year between 1880 and 1970.”
Sources: lib.stat.cmu.edu/DASL/Datafiles/Oilproduction.html, US EIA.
“Figure 11: Between 1880 and 1940, the annual production rate of oil and, initially, associated lease condensate, in the US was increasing 9% per year!”
“Figure 12: Between 1880 and 1960, the annual production rate of natural gas in the US was increasing 7.2% per year.”
Exponential growth, energetic Hubbert cycles, and the advancement of technology
Archives of Mining Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, May 3, 2008
Unless we rapidly develop alternative fuels, all oil importing countries are facing a much faster geophysically forced decline in the very near future.
See: Peak Oil Versus Peak Net Exports–Which Should We Be More Concerned About? by Jeffrey J. Brown, Samuel Foucher, PhD, Jorge Silveus
I’m glad Ross has the cojones to say what needed saying in a widely read public forum. I’ve passed this along to some other sites I visit regularly that have nothing to do with climate, etc. Perhaps someone could bribe the media to invite Ross on a news show on March 26th. 🙂
They could do something productive like planting a tree. But symbolism is all-important to the ranks of mindless eco-drones.
One other thing, my father-a working cowboy,had a life not much different than his
ancestors in Appalachia, or the great plains. No electricity,no running water, no indoor plumbing. Until the 1930’s then the REA came and they had electric power.
The world changed. The cows were miked by machine, Granpa got rid of the Steam
tractor.(Kept the horses, though-just in case) Though still hard, life was easier.
Productivity increased, so did prosperity. Pop made much money selling horses to the
US.Calvary-no kidding. That was replaced by Wheat, Milk, Beef. By the end of the
fourth year of WW2 there was no more horse Calvary….
Why do the greenies want poverty and want? that causes Wars.
-Or maybe that’s the point…
Peter Kovachev says: March 17, 2011 at 7:50 am
Very well said sir! It is the mark of our soft-socialist governments that they encourage people to ‘inform’ on their neighbours. They start with the small things, like the move to get school-children to inform on people who are not ‘green’!
Brilliant. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
The consequence of support.
The darker side of Earth day is that compliance with the nonsense, if those who vilify mankind for his success have their way, will not be voluntary about anything they wish to influence.
The consequence of the hardships they would impose will not be shared by those in power but separated from the population as happened in the old USSR where the ruling elite lived very privileged lives in grand luxury while the general population suffered from ruling elite laws and often incompetent decisions.
The supporters, of the celebration of Earth Day, no matter what their station in life, should be exposed for what they are, enablers of would be dictators who are willing to ignore or are oblivious the consequences.
“Earth Hour” is an act of contrition and “Earth Day” is penance for sins against the church of Environmentalism. If by not being a penitent consumer of cheap energy makes me a sinner, then I am surely going to hell…with pleasure. Sure am glad I don’t subscribe to their religion.
“ew-3 says:
March 17, 2011 at 8:35 am
Excellent!
It seems even more profound when you think of what the people of Japan are going through. Some of those people don’t have a choice to do without electricity.”
Absolutely!
Not only the homeless and displaced suffering privation in the quake and tsunami affected areas, but also the rest of the country which, whilst intact, must share the pain in the form of rolling brownouts as part of their nuclear power component self destructs.
Here in the UK, the MSM to a man indulges in wild speculation about the stricken plant and, having solicited the measured and reassuring considerations of nuclear scientists, prefers to publicise ad nauseam the hysterical, hyperbolic outpourings of their so called science correspondents. It comes as no surprise that these are the same people that manifest their stupidity reporting the AGW stories.
So far I have heard nothing about the Japanese nationwide rolling brownouts; I can only assume that the powers that be would rather we did not see the resultant inconvenience, lest we put two and two together and recall the unfortunate words of Steve Holliday, the CEO of our national grid, who thought that very eventuality would be a very smart thing to do.
No jojo, it hit the nail square on the head. I am constantly dealing with the ideology of the greens that that wants us to return to a simpler time (that simply DID NOT exist). Technology is far more of an answer than a threat.