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
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Send a link for this essay to every newspaper editorial board in the world in anticipation of the March 26th Idiot Hour.
This is not up to Ross McKitrick’s usual standard. I agree with him in recognising the contribution of cheap electricity to the growth and prosperity of humanity. But that is not what Earth-Hour is about. It reminds us that irrespective of out views about climate change we have a duty to be frugal in our own consumption of scarce resources – for the sake of the poor and for the sake of the planet. If Earth-Hour brings home that point then that must be a good thing.
Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness
What Karl Marx excoriated as “rural idiocy”
@John Johnston
You made my point well. Exactly: if everyone turned everything off the grid would encounter huge problems. Energy would have to be dumped into heat sinks or steered to other networks, either free or even at a loss to allow the generators to continue turning in anticipation of a snap on again after only one hour.
Ontario Hydro once had a problem in the 50’s where a sudden change in the load caused generators to start revving up and down against each other, first within one station then between stations then across the whole Ontario grid. It was uncontrollable because the bearing/braking systems were not up to scratch. My father told me they had to turn all of them off then start the stations in the order they had been built because no knew how to prevent it see-sawing again on start-up. Using telephones they coordinated the cut-in of each generator, by age, until it was humming along as usual.
Modern controls can prevent the system taking itself down but can it withstand the deliberate yanking of a giant on-off switch twice in an hour? I guess time will tell.
While I agree with his position, Ross is taking a fairly narrow viewpoint on Earth Hour; its proponents oppose much more than just cheap, widely available electricity – broadly speaking, under all the platitudes they’re pretty much opposed to the Western model of industrial development.
Further, I’d argue that it hasn’t been just the broad availability of electricity that has advanced our quality of life to where it is now, but rather the discovery and exploitation of portable hydrocarbons for transportation fuels. From shoveling coal into locomotive and steamship boiler fireboxes to tanking up our 747s and Gulfstreams (I wish…) and Corvette ZR1s (and Jetta TDIs, if you’re of such a mind) we have come a very long way in a very short time from the days of, say, the 17th century where almost everyone lived, worked and died within a very few miles of where they were born.
Ross should join one of Hydro Quebec elite banquets here to really know how to celebrate electricity. These guys really know how to do it up well. I am just waiting for Hydro Qubec to bring back their famous advertisements about living better with electricity. You just simply can’t use enough of the stuff to live better.
Thanks, Snotrocket. “Snotrocked,” the visuals of this moniker are simply apalling…I love it. Fortunately, I haven’t heard of roaming packs of eco-jugend enforcing Earth Hour…yet. However, a friend had a neighbour ring his (electric) doorbell and ask him to turn off his lights, as he was the only one on their street who hadn’t.
Here in Toronto we had a case last year in one of the schools where a kid who brought his lunch in a plastic “zip-lock” baggie (washable and reusable, btw) got singled out and penalized in some way or another. Parents are suing, and for once, I think that’s a fairly worthwhile reaction to out-of-control stupidity.
Bob Ryan,
Earth Hour uses your feel-good sentiments as camoflage for handing over our individual liberties to Big Government.
The people behind Earth Hour care not a whit for either the poor or the planet. If we followed the lead of the wannabe statists there would be mass starvation, and the Earth Hour folks could not care less. No doubt that is what they really desire.
Power is what they’re after. If they cared about the world’s poor they would give up their repeatedly falsified “carbon” scare and support the production of efficient energy.
You can tell Al Gore he has “a duty to be frugal” in his consumption. But don’t tell me; I’m already frugal, and all I really hear you saying is: “Give up your freedom, and conform!” They used to call Earth Hour-type lemmings ‘useful idiots’ in the old Soviet Union. Nothing has changed.
“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.”
So you are prepared to subsidise the peasants in their huts with no financial wealth so they can use fossil fuel whose price will rise because of the doubling in demand and the lack of future resources. According to wiki $4 to $14 /cu metre is the price of natural gas without their demands. This can only increase as supplies diminish and demand increases. I am surprised you would be willing to subsidise them as this would be a very socialist policy.
Perhaps their meagre electric demands could be met by a windmill and solar cells better (until the fusion breakthrough)?
I don’t think you have thought this through!
Here is a suggestion…
Let’s start our own day of celebration of Electricity & Light. In 1879, Thomas Alva Edison invented the first commercially practical incandescent electric lamp. The lamp itself was perfected on October 21st, 1879, on which day there was put into circuit the first bulb embodying the principles known as the “Edison modern incandescent lamp.” This bulb maintained its incandescence for over 40 hours. So we could use October 21st of each year to celebrate. In order not to overcharge our electrical grid, we could just shine flash lights to the sky on the 21st hour. That would certainly look cool from space. Instead of blackouts, they would see lights.
Let them have their little hour of stupidity and ignorance and let us shine on every October 21st at 21:00h. I bet we will have much more of an impact, kids would love to shine a flashlight to the sky.
Who’s with me?
Even with price of electricity rising, we have celebrated our liberation every earth hour since its creation by turning on every light inside and outside our home.
Kudos to Dr. McKitrick for stating the facts as they need to be stated.
The Luddites may currently rule the roost, but they will eventually they will fall. I hope its sooner rather than later, but fall they must, as all false doctrines have before them.
Jeremy: “True earth-hour rebellion would be putting up christmas lights and turning them on…”
Just so happens we still have our christmas lights up on the house (much to my wife’s chagrin), although a much more modest display than your linked photo. I’ll have to keep them up a couple more weeks so I can turn them on during Earth Hour!
Bob Ryan says:
March 17, 2011 at 10:12 am
This is not up to Ross McKitrick’s usual standard. I agree with him in recognising the contribution of cheap electricity to the growth and prosperity of humanity. But that is not what Earth-Hour is about. It reminds us that irrespective of out views about climate change we have a duty to be frugal in our own consumption of scarce resources – for the sake of the poor and for the sake of the planet. If Earth-Hour brings home that point then that must be a good thing.
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I ask you, has it brought home that point? Apparently not. But, that’s probably only because it is based on a failed premise. “we have a duty to be frugal in our own consumption of scarce resources”…….Show me what “scarce resources” we are consuming? The thought is a trap of the worst kind. Efficiency has always been the aim of technological advancements. It continues to be so. Our fuel use is directly tied to our economic advancements. As was pointed out earlier, it is poverty that kills. Mankind has been hearing the “scarce resource” thought since before Malthus. Paul Ehrlich is one that advanced the idea recently, as has many others. I consider it a most dire form of misanthrope.
Bob, don’t fall in the trap!
Here’s how we celebrated the “Hour of Power” at the Currie homeschool last year:
http://jaycurrie.info-syn.com/eager-homeschoolers-get-ready-for-the-hour-of-power/
Yes, those are 1000 watt photolights.
(Now we do live in British Columbia where well over 90% of the electricity is hydro generated so we likely did not release any of that nasty plant food into the atmosphere; but we annoyed our more sanctimonious neighbours which made it all worth while.)
Interesting that EarthHour is scheduled during one of the periods of time when most of the northern hemisphere can go without heat or A/C fairly safely.
I had the “privilege” of experiencing EarthWeek in December 2007 when an ice storm took down 90% of the power lines in the town where I lived. Even in a semi-underground, well-insulated, small apartment that had been pre-heated to 75 F (just in case), it got quite chilly rather rapidly. Not having lights or hot water was also unpleasant. I gave in and relocated when it got to 38 F inside.
Talking of electricity the people in the the Tsunami hit area of Sendai in Japan will be suffering from a couple more nights of sub-zero temperatures. Parts of north eastern Japan are also enduring snow. This is the real demon.
Hear, hear! Lubos Motl is right. Every year, I tell friends they should flip on a bunch of switches in their houses to celebrate Earth Hour, er, Human Achievement Hour. Use your electricity and be proud of it!
These fools only want to celebrate Earth Hour AFTER having achieved good standards of living over and above those people living in the developing world. I live in a developing country and I can tell everyone here that it sucks when the lights keep going out. Businesses just turn on their generators and chuck out the soot again. Candles are also lit which regularly causes house fires and the loss of hard earned belongings.
These idiots are watermelons to the core. Utter hypocrites!
Excellent. Thank you for that excellent essay.
I have an idea to how to celebrate electricity and vote against earth hour. How about we turn off our electric water cylinders during the afternoon, say about 8 hours before earth hour. Then we turn them on again together at the commencement of earth hour. That way we wouldn’t use more energy, we might even save some, and it wouldn’t cost a cent! And we could absolutely blow away the impact of them turning off their energy efficient lamps.
thefordprefect says:
“So you are prepared to subsidise the peasants in their huts with no financial wealth so they can use fossil fuel whose price will rise because of the doubling in demand and the lack of future resources.”
You get today’s conflation award. Who is proposing subsidies? The West didn’t develop using subsidies; the free market provided cheap, abundant energy and enormous wealth. I feel sorry for those in the third world who live under bad governments – which is the only reason for their national poverty.
But I feel no guilt. If their despotic governments instituted reforms including minimal government interference, free trade, property rights, low taxation, and a fair legal system, within one generation you would see a South Korea-type society emerge from the previous North Korea-type poverty.
Bad government is the sole reason for national poverty. Japan has no natural resources, but it is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Unfortunately, our present Administration is leading this country down the wrong path, and the result will be much higher taxes, expensive, intermittent energy supplies, and increasing poverty. And it appears to be a deliberate agenda.
Thank you, Dr McKitrick. You have forcefully and coherently expressed my feelings. I will be referring others to this post.
Have you thought of trying to get this published in the Post? It deserves wider exposure and I think they would do it.
A great essay, so well put and to the point.
I like Lubos Motl’s idea of energy hour
I’m up for it. Lets celebrate man’s acheivements.
Maybe even our US friends could fire up ” Old sparky” for energy hour and top some cons. Use electricty wisely
I’m re-posting this link from the thread above, for obvious reasons:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8388279/Japan-earthquake-country-on-brink-of-massive-blackouts.html
I hope the earth-hour-people watch the situation in Japan carefully, because this will happen to them, who so love it, and to us, who haven’t asked for this, if their insane plans for renewables only are being implemented.
Brilliant. Ross McKitrick is a light shining in a world of green-imposed darkness.