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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@Peter Kovachev, March 17, 2011 at 10:30 am:
Thanks, Snotrocket. “Snotrocked,” the visuals of this moniker are simply apalling…I love it.
Just between me and you, it’s Mr Science: But, being a friendly sort of guy, I use Snotrocket – my first name. 😉
I’ve made a reservation to eat out on that night… I mean, I can’t eat at home with the lights off, right?
This is like Meatless Mondays, which we follow with T-Bone Tuesdays, just for balance.
I love electricity and all it brings to our modern way of living as much as anyone, but I also work hard for the money I earn and I don’t like throwing it away needlessly. Every penny I don’t spend giving it the power company is a penny I can spend somehwere else or save. If you enjoy your big electricity and gas bill each month, good for you, but as the cost/benefit and ROI makes sense, I’m making my home and my business as energy efficient as possible and using less grid power than ever, and within a few years, I’ll be selling my excess energy back to the grid…and to you. So turn on your christmas lights and everything else in your house and open up your wallet!
Thank you, Prof. McKitrick, you speak for me, too. I love electricity, and since I learned at a
rathermuch younger age where not to put my fingers, it and I have done a lot of good and had a lot of fun.Being of sound mind, I’d like it to be cheaper, actually, but in a country where all major political parties are committed to claptrap and insist on adding ever-increasing quantities to our bills to fund useless bird mincers that’s not going to happen, at least not until “after the revolution”.
R Gates gives us another reason to eliminate alternative energy subsidies, and a lesson on how not to win friends and influence people.
… and another thing!
Why stop at one hour, or a day or week.
Why not force them to ‘celebrate’ earth hour for three whole months, in winter?
Hand the wimmin of that movement some books from the 19th century, about how to run a house: washing, drying, ironing, keeping the fires going, cleaning the lamps, cleaning the floors without a hoover, no fridge, no freezer except the one outdoors, water from a pump outside …
At least this would mean they’d have no time nor inclination to go on any protest marches, or read any of their propaganda literature: they’d be far too exhausted …
Please ignore – just want to follow comments
WWF and their war on population has always turned my stomache.
In my mind, the turning out of the lights are a demonstration of WWF:s
desire to wipe out humanity from the face of the earth, and the few
initiated who recognize this are alughing inside when the stupid humans
signal compliance.
The author of “Brave new world”, Aldous Huxley, had a brother, Julian Huxley who was a very strong advocate for selective breeding and sterilization in humans. Julian was one of the founders of WWF, so was Maurice Strong.
WWF even linked to a paper discussing ways to forcibly sterilize people, with viruses spread by mosquitos and by vaccines.
Sounds like a James Bond Villain, and indeed, Strong and WWF/IMF was the inspiration for the eco-villain “Maurice Green” in the Bond movie “Quantum of Solace”.
This is such a wicked evil bunch of people, that when you tell the truth about them, people think you are making it up, but it is all true.
Oh, the author of the script for quantum of solace is canadian, so is Maurice Green, sorry, I mean Maurice Strong.
Smokey says:
March 17, 2011 at 11:39 am
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.
====================================================
Indeed, from Goddard’s site,
Obama Succeeds!
“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe”———— Secretary Of Energy Chu
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122904040307499791.html
and, “Illinois Senator Barack Obama has slipped an amendment into the energy bill providing a $30,000 tax credit to encourage gas stations to pump “E85,” an 85% blend of ethanol and gas used by so-called flexible-fuel vehicles.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article 0,9171,1069470,00.html#ixzz1Gt2RyfVJ
We are well on our way to being able to say, “Mission Accomplished.”
My wife and I worked as humanitarian missionaries in the Dominican Republic for six years recently, only returning to the States last year. 80% of the people there either have no electric at all, or random, partial service, an hour or two a day — insufficient for refrigeration. They would desperately love to get regular dependable electricity so that they could keep food cold and safe to eat. Children die there from this lack. Children don’t study and do homework in the evenings, as there is no brightly shining light bulb.
Our Dominican friends laugh when a ‘disasterous’ power outage is reported on the US TV news, some neighborhood without power for …well…hours!
I’m all for cutting down on energy waste but the phrase ‘turning out the lights’ isn’t accidentally associated with death….that’s what it really means for so many people.
I wish more of my fellow canadians had the courage to speak out like this.
This means I have until March 26th to fix my pool lights.
Smokey says:
March 17, 2011 at 12:15 pm
R Gates gives us another reason to eliminate alternative energy subsidies, and a lesson on how not to win friends and influence people.
____
Smokey,
You apparently love giving your money to the big utility companies…and eventually to me. Keep it up…
And right now, electricity is being brought into many 3rd world countries, village by village, and it isn’t big grid power, but small solar power systems that are truly making a difference in these people’s lives…Small (and Electric) is a beautiful thing! Here’s one company now competing in this space:
http://www.ic-green.com/ABOUTUS/OurCompany.aspx
I agree with everything Ross says.
Seems obvious to me why it is only an earth hour. They want to get people to support their point of view in a way that is very little effort, but leave them feeling pleased with themselves.
About my idea above… apparently, the invention of the incandescent light bulb was made first by Sir Joseph Wilson Swan and not Edison. So, we would need to find another date and time to light up the sky.
What a wonderful article……it would be very interesting to listen to the views of Cameron, Obama, Moon and Gillard on Earth Hour and then ask them to comment on this.
Better still get them to comment on both in front of the poor and needy in the Third World.
Very well written, Ross. At my house, we celebrate Illumination Hour during Earth Hour. It may be childish, but it is kind of fun to run all electrical devices at one time. Earth Hour is one those meaningless “feel good” gestures anyway.
http://depriest-mpu.blogspot.com/2009/03/over-years-i-have-been-amazed-at.html
R. Gates writes, “[a]nd right now, electricity is being brought into many 3rd world countries, village by village, and it isn’t big grid power, but small solar power systems that are truly making a difference in these people’s lives…”
Indeed. And, after being decimated with malaria, thanks to Sanger’s “Silent Spring” and the resulting ban on DDT, the “silent genocide” of sub-Saharan Africans can merrily continue, now by teasing them into further misery with placebo power sources. All to be provided by government-cushioned “green” corporations, of course, the kind run by cutting-edge kidults with messianic complexes and an old fashioned hunger for the green stuff. Africans need to kick such goofs out and to liberally access their massive coal reserves. They need real, experienced and competent mining and utilities companies which will provide them with plentiful and affordable electricity, the only time-proven exit gate out of poverty.
WOW! Earth hour is observed to raise awareness. Not to protest against electricity, or the use of it. It is to bring to the front the fact that electriciy, just like any other forms of energy is scarce and people should preserve it. Limit the usage! (Switch of that light when u r not using it)
U really thought earth hour is to protest against the evil rulings of the ‘electricity’ dictator?
Sir Charles Parsons, Englishman. Inventor of the steam turbine, if he was alive today he would probably be rotating in his grave*. Cheap and reliable electricity has given us everything we have.
*And probably generating more power than those ludicrous windmills that now litter our landscape.
Excellent – I’ll be manning the lighting desk for a revue at my local church hall for that hour and will have thousands of watts of lighting power under my command. Hope those on stage like it bright!!!
hMAd says:
March 17, 2011 at 2:00 pm
WOW! Earth hour is observed to raise awareness. Not to protest against electricity, or the use of it. It is to bring to the front the fact that electriciy, just like any other forms of energy is scarce and people should preserve it. Limit the usage! (Switch of that light when u r not using it)
===================================================
First, electricity isn’t scarce. It just isn’t shared well.
Secondly, you’re celebrating by doing something we were all taught as children? Why don’t we celebrate shutting open doors or shoe tying, too?
I switched on all my outside and indoor lights last time those unknown people who pay for the TV advertisements for “Earth Hour” tried their silly trick. This time I will do it again.
Another thing living with inexpensive electricity seems to do is reduce the family size. Without it you need a large family (6 to 12), half of which will not live to become adults. They collect firewood, clean the pots, work the crops and if you are lucky take care of you in your old age (perhaps 30 to 50 years old). I can think of no exceptions. However, put me down as a “Waste not-Want not” person. I find no benefit in wasting energy, especially if it is just to show you can.
Robert
The writing style of McKittrick is very manly, direct and accurate.
S!