Guest post by Russ Rodrigues
On Saturday, March 31st at 8.30pm (local time) WWF is inviting you and everyone around the world to celebrate Earth Hour 2012 by turning off non-essential lights for sixty minutes to “protect the planet”.
Now, I’m all for saving electricity and lowering my utility bills, though I can’t help but wonder… does the collective action of millions of people turning off their lights have any real, tangible impact on our planet? Can an hour of conspicuous conservation actually help us achieve our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets? Or is Earth Hour merely another exercise in self-satisfying slacktivism, achieving nothing more than the squishy “feel-good” objective of “raising awareness”?
To answer these questions and get a sense of how effective Earth Hour really is, let’s look at the results of last year’s effort, specifically in the province of Ontario, Canada (where I happen to live).
Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) reported that that on March 26th, 2011, between 8:30pm and 9:30pm, due to conservation action during the last episode of Earth Hour, province-wide demand for electricity fell by 360 megawatts or 2.1% compared to a typical Saturday evening in late March.
Let’s simply assume that all 360 MWh of power demand was actually eliminated, rather than being merely postponed. Since it would be difficult to quantify the impact of time-shifting household activities, let’s just be generous and ignore it altogether.
How big a deal is 360 MWh? At Ontario’s blended average retail electricity price of 7.74 cents per kWh, that 360 MWh of reduced consumption amounts to a province-wide total cash savings of $24,864. One could, perhaps, compare that savings to the money spent promoting Earth Hour in Ontario by the WWF, various levels of governments, and numerous corporate partners, to say nothing of the costs incurred by the individual participants. But I don’t imagine that would be a favourable comparison.
So cost savings aside, how big an impact did Ontario’s Earth Hour have on the province’s CO2 emissions? Let’s ignore the extra emissions generated by people who traveled to and from public gatherings, or by those who lit paraffin wax candles (each of which emits about as much fossil-fuel derived CO2 per hour as a compact fluorescent light bulb). For simplicity, we’ll just focus on the CO2 emissions from the electricity that was saved.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), non-baseload electricity emits an average of 690 g of CO2 per kWh into the atmosphere. So, by simple math, by conserving 360 MW of electric power during Earth Hour, Ontarians reduced their CO2 emissions by a total of 248 metric tonnes.
248 tonnes. That sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it? And it isn’t really that difficult to achieve… in fact, it’s even kind of fun. Perhaps we could just have a few more Earth Hours each year, and have some real impact on our emissions reduction targets. So, how many Earth Hours would it take? Once every quarter? One per month? Or maybe make it a fortnightly event?
In 2007, Ontario introduced its Climate Change Action Plan action to reduce total GHG emissions. This action plan established an annual GHG reduction target “6% below 1990 levels by 2014, a reduction of 61 megatonnes relative to business-as-usual” (pg 6). By eliminating 248 tonnes of CO2 emissions, Earth Hour achieved 0.000407% of this target.
Or, looked at another way, it would take nearly 246,000 Earth Hours to achieve the province’s annual emissions reduction target. Unfortunately, there are only 8760 hours in a year, so it would require a little more than 28 years of sitting in the dark to make good on a single year’s emissions reduction target. The WWF certainly isn’t kidding when it asks Earth Hour participants to sustain their actions “beyond the hour.”
But details like this aren’t what Earth Hour is about. It’s about demonstrating our commitment to the planet… about taking a stand on climate change… about promoting environmental consciousness. It’s a symbol of hope for the future. It’s an opportunity to light lots of pretty candles (preferably of the carbon-neutral, beeswax variety) and unite as a community in celebration of… well, uniting as a community. Yes, it’s all that and countless other fluffy intangibles.
So, you might as well just enjoy Earth Hour. While switching off your lights won’t achieve any material impact in terms of reducing emissions or protecting the planet, at least you can shave a bit off your electric bill while feeling good about yourselves. And of course, you’ll be doing your part to “raise awareness”.
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Spreadsheet for the calculations: Earth Hour Calculations (.xlsx)
I belong to a social club & a member is proposing an event for Earth Hour, described as:
“Join us and take part in this global event. Earth Hour has been organised by The World Wildlife Fund since 2007 and is held annually on the last Saturday in March. The intention is to inspire people from all parts of the globe to take seriously sustainability and environmental issues and to appreciate the world we all share. As they point out, a healthy planet isn’t just good for polar bears but for all of us.
People are asked to switch off non-essential lights for one hour. Most things are possible by candlelight and of course some things are more fun.
We will have a quiz and food; whether its a sit down meal, buffet or bring and share will depend on numbers. Please let me know asap, if you think you may be interested; it doesn’t have to be definite and will not commit you to coming. More details will follow.
Donations will go towards WWF; the suggestion is for whatever you might normally want to spend on a Saturday night!”
I’d like to make a polite, factual response to this- can WUWT readers help?
Of course, the power plants can’t scale down their production of electricity during that one hour. The turbines must spin…just in case. Just as they must spin to back up all those bird shredders called windmills when the wind doesn’t blow (or blows too hard).
BTW, Russ, I hope you didn’t hurt your tongue when you planted it so firmly in your cheek while typing that penultimate paragraph.
“…It’s about demonstrating our commitment to the planet… about taking a stand on climate change… about promoting environmental consciousness. It’s a symbol of hope for the future. It’s an opportunity to light lots of pretty candles (preferably of the carbon-neutral, beeswax variety) and unite as a community in celebration of… well, uniting as a community. Yes, it’s all that and countless other fluffy intangibles.”
Fluffy indeed!
I will certainly help. For the whole month of March and April, I will not turn on a light, my computer, my hot water heater, the stove and microwave, coffee maker, washer and dryer, the TV and the thermostat is set at 12 C. Guess I should post this on an AGW site and challenge someone to surpass my efforts.
Earth hour is earth’s hour, in the sense of denying for an hour the worth of humanity.
Of course the actual energy saving was ZERO.
You can’t just take your foot off the “gas pedal” at a power station – those tons and tons of rapidly spinning generators don’t like to change velocity rapidly – so just because demand dropped for a short period of time doesn’t equate to a single gram of CO2 – the boilers and turbines were kept at base load capacity as calculated by the engineers as sufficient meet demand fluctuations and the energy “saved” by Earth hour was simply wasted.
Not one single gram of CO2 is saved by this farce – the only value it may be considered to have is a feel good one – or perhaps conditioning us to our “clean energy” future whereby less than a few percent of energy supply today is going to be the only energy supply in our future.
Definitely not worth the effort even if AGW was real. I recall the electric company released the stats during earth hour a year or two ago, and guess what?? The electric consumption went a bit up compared to normal, which was explained by electric ovens turning on when those old fashioned light bulbs were switched off.
Here in this climate there is absolutely no benefits which is also why the ban of the old fashioned bulbs makes absolutely no sense.
The energy is not wasted and helps heat up our buildings.
I am going to do what I always do. I will turn on my LED lights and use them for whatever purpose. Instead of the total hypocrisy of mucking up the environment with mercury compliments of twisters, I will read my books using all of 7.5 W of LED spotlight. Do I do this to reduce global warming? You gotta be kidding. I do this because I am a simple NE Yankee chap who runs his life by “Use it up, wear it out, or do without”. Aka a cheapskate. I love Obama yacking his head off today about CAFE standards. Hey, buddy, nothing works like the free market and high gasoline prices to make people want higher mpg cars. King Canute demonstrated his humility. This idjit (sic) thinks he can keep the tide from coming in. Oh, my car? Yeah, it is 16 years old now, gets 28 mpg city and 37 highway. A simple dumb old Ford Escort Wagon. Told ya I was a cheapskate.
Every year at this time I re-read the predictions made on Earth Day 1970, and have a bit of a giggle. They’re quite fun to bring up whenever one encounters a true believer.
http://www.ihatethemedia.com/fifteen-foolish-forecasts-how-did-environmentalists-get-it-so-wrong-on-earth-day-1970
No more wimpy Earth Hour, instead how about a Big Brother Earth Month?
Where the world’s greatest environmentalists get to spend 12 weeks in a house where any function or food that depends on fossil fuel is not allowed. Think, no running water, no commercial foods, no electronic communications, everything replaced with green revolution technology like with wind up torches, well water, home grown veggies. It really is about time environuts showed the rest of us how it is done.
Eve, I suggest you ask Al Gore to join you. He could regale you with stories about how he invented the internet. It would be fun in the dark with Al.
“Earth Hour” is just an idiot indicator, to see how strong the general belief is and the possible extent they can encourage mandatory expenses and taxes …
It has been said before and needs to be said again: You are encouraged to turn off the light, the symbol of life, hope and existence … Figure it out for yourself!
All the AGW movements in the United States should register as ecclesial organizations. Then they will not need to pay taxes for their commercial business …
Before it’s to late …
I did the calculations in a message I sent to my colleagues last year. Here it is:
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The purpose of Earth Day is to “turn off lights for one hour as a symbolic action to raise awareness about climate change.” The goal of sitting in the dark for an hour is to provide “an opportunity for all of us to reflect on what we can do – at home and in the office – to lessen our impact on the environment.”
I thought I’d simply offer a few facts and figures for your consideration as “Earth Hour” approaches. First, according to the IMF, there is a direct and very stark correlation between electrification and standard of living. The poorest countries in the world are also those with the lowest levels of electrification (expressed in Watts of electrical consumption per person).
The group with the highest per capita electrical consumption contains Australia, the US, Canada and Norway; the lowest contains Chad, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Bangladesh. Nobody in any of those latter countries will be turning off any light-bulbs on Saturday night, because the per capita electrical consumption in each of those countries is 15 Watts per person or less – not enough to run a single light-bulb. In other words, if you want to raise the standard of living of people in the worst-off countries in the world, don’t send them cheques, used clothing or Hollywood celebrities; provide them with cheap, abundant electrical power.
The importance of electrification is not reflected only in GDP. International activists and aid agencies are continually bombarding potential donors with heart-rending images of children in the most dire conditions of abject poverty. Well, guess what – there’s also a very direct and very stark correlation between electrification and child mortality.
Graphing child mortality against electrifcal consumption, once again the extreme end groups contain Australia, the US, Canada and Norway (highest electrical consumption and lowest child mortality), while the countries with the lowest electrical consumption have the highest child mortality: Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Chad and Afghanistan. In other words, if you want to solve the child mortality problem – which, according to all of the commercials we see on TV, is the purpose of foreign aid – then once again, don’t send monetary donations to individuals or agencies; provide the population with cheap, abundant electrical power.
Electricity is the lifeblood of modern society. I don’t just mean its trinkets and trappings, like X-Boxes and LCD televisions; I mean its very foundations. Stop and imagine for a moment what would happen if the power really went out. Not just a few light-bulbs, but everything.
Actually, you don’t have to imagine it – you just have to have been living in Ontario or the north-eastern US on the 14th of August 2003.
Remember that? That was the great Northeast blackout – the second most widespread blackout in history, affecting 10,000,000 people in Ontario and 45,000,000 in the US. That part of the grid normally supplied about 28 GW of power. During the outage, supply dropped to about 5 GW. You can find pictures of the continent at night. It’s fascinating how much the blacked-out area looks like the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson’s Bay – places where there are simply no people. This is what doing without electricity looks like.
You want symbolism? THAT is symbolism.
Do you suppose the people affected by that blackout were reflecting on how good the loss of the grid was for “the environment”? Or were they wondering how to keep their food from spoiling, how to get water out of their 180’ well without a pump, how to cook, how to clean their clothes, or – luxury of luxuries! – how to cool their homes in the 35+ temperatures we were enjoying that day? Were they worrying about carbon emissions, or about driving safely without traffic lights? Or about how long auxiliary generators at hospitals would hold out? Or whether banks could keep their computer servers running? Or how to fuel their cars with no power to the gas pumps? Were police, fire and ambulance radio services still working? Were the intensive care, cardiac and oncology units at hospitals still functioning? How about air traffic control?
And that was in the summer, when ambient outdoor temperatures are survivable. But this is Canada. Suppose a major blackout had happened in winter? Wait a minute…it did.
The central North American ice storm of January 1998 destroyed over 1000 high tension pylons (and 35,000 wooden power poles) in Quebec alone, and resulted in a loss of electrical power to more than 4,000,000 consumers, in some cases for many weeks. The damage to the grid was so severe and so widespread that the Army deployed armoured personnel carriers to rip downed power lines out of the ice in an attempt to salvage them. Damage exceeded $4-6 billion and resulted in the largest domestic deployment of military personnel in Canadian history.
Thousands of farm animals were crushed under falling roofs, or froze to death because there was no power to heat their buildings. During those power outages, how many folks do you think were reflecting on their impact on the environment…as opposed to, say, the environment’s impact on them?
We take the grid for granted; we treat it like a constant, something that’ll always be there. But it’s not a constant; it’s an enormous and immensely complex, interconnected, continent-wide machine consisting of hundreds of power plants, thousands of transformer stations, hundreds of thousands of step-down transformers, millions of pylons and miles of wire, hundreds of millions of individual consumers, and tens of billions of electrical appliances. Managing the generation, distribution and consumption of the amount of energy handled by the grid is a feat of engineering that makes most other human achievements look like finger-painting. Every day the North American grid distributes the electrical equivalent of the energy contained in a 10 Megaton hydrogen bomb – and yet we don’t even think about it.
It took the most technically advanced civilization in history more than a hundred years to accomplish something as magnificently complicated, capable and invisible as the North American power grid, and it takes all of our ingenuity to keep it operating in the face of ever-increasing demand, insufficient maintenance, and government regulations that place illogical constraints on generators. And as we are painfully reminded every time there’s a major power outage, the grid is all that stands between us and the unpleasant reality of the natural world. If you live in Canada, that’s a pretty serious consideration.
Now, let’s take a moment to think about what “Earth Hour” really symbolizes. If you accept the figures in the CIA World Factbook and those provided by the US Energy Information Administration, then the per capita electricity consumption in Canada is 1910 W/person. For a family of 4, then, the total load is 7640 W. The average Canadian house, according to NRCan, has 40.9 light bulbs,(Note A) of which 52% are high-efficiency (usually CFLs rather than the far more efficient, longer-lasting and much safer LED bulbs). At an average of 60W per incandescent light bulb, and 15W per CFL (to match the 800 lumens generated by a 60W incandescent bulb), the approximate lighting load for the average household if all lights were turned on simultaneously (an unusual occurrence) would be (21×15)+(20×60)=1515W.
In my house, I counted; between 1930 and 2030 hrs on a Saturday, I would normally have 2 lights on in the kitchen, 3 in the office, 1 in the living room, 2 in the kids’ bedrooms, and 3 outside. Half of these are halogen or LED, but let’s pretend they’re all 60W incandescent bulbs – that’s a total load of 11×60 or 660W. If I turn these all off for one hour, I will have spared the grid 0.66 kWh.
What kind of emissions am I saving? Well, according to Ontario Power Generation (Note B), Ontario’s generating capacity is roughly one-third each nuclear (6606 MW), hydroelectric (6996 MW) and thermal (6327 MW). As I write this, however, the power actually being produced by each of those elements of our overall generating capacity is 5709 MW from nuclear, 2255 MW from hydroelectric, and 319 MW from thermal plants. In other words, of the 8283 MW currently being generated in Ontario, only 3.85% comes from carbon-emitting sources (accordingly, even if you accept the premise of the AGW thesis, 96.15% of Ontario’s generated electricity cannot in any way be even remotely connected to “climate change”). So of the 0.66 kWh I’ll save by shutting off my lights for “Earth Hour”, I’m saving 0.66 x 0.0385 = 0.0254 kWh worth of emissions. According to Environment Canada, using coal to produce electricity creates 0.5418 kg of carbon dioxide per kWh generated, so turning off my light bulbs for an hour will save 0.5418 x 0.0254 = 0.0137 kg, or 14 grams, of carbon dioxide.
Paraffin, a complex hydrocarbon that is solid at room temperature, produces, like other alkane fuels, roughly 3 kg of carbon dioxide per litre when burned (about a 3:1 ratio by mass). This means that if I want to replace my lost electrical light with paraffin candles, then – if I want to remain “Earth-friendly” – I can’t generate more than 14 grams of carbon dioxide. This means that I can only burn about 5 grams of paraffin. Ikea sells packs of 24 tea lights weighing 2 pounds (909 grams), so each tea light weighs about 37.85 grams (call it 35 grams once we lose the packaging and the aluminum holder for the paraffin). If I can only burn 5 grams of paraffin, that’s 1/7 or 14.3% of a tea light. Tea lights are advertised to burn for 4 hours, so to get one hour’s worth of light out of one, I’d have to burn 25% of it.
So I can light a single tea light during Earth Hour to replace the 11 light-bulbs I’ve turned off – but I’ll have to blow it out after 14.3/25×60=34 minutes, or else I’ll have produced more carbon dioxide from my tiny candle than Ontario Power Generation would have produced to run my 11 light-bulbs for an hour.
For the first 34 minutes of “Earth Hour”, therefore, I’ll be trying to run my life by the light of a single, tiny candle; and for the last 26 minutes, I’ll be sitting idle in the dark.
It doesn’t get any more symbolic than that.
If “Earth Hour” symbolizes anything at all, frankly, it’s the inability of people to do basic arithmetic. It also symbolizes the widespread and appalling ignorance of the historical fact that abundant electricity produced by the cheapest means available (and anyone who understands the market should understand that “abundant” and “cheapest means available” are inextricably interconnected) is a major part of the difference between the life that we enjoy here, and the grinding poverty and catastrophic child mortality of the third world.
Nowhere is this easier to see than in a night-time satellite image of the Sea of Japan. The northern part of the Korean peninsula simply isn’t visible, because there’s virtually no electrical power anywhere but in Pyongyang. It’s always “Earth Hour” in North Korea. If you want to reflect on something during Earth Hour, reflect on that.
The line dividing the modern from the pre-modern world is drawn in electric light. It took an awful lot of human science, human ingenuity, human resources and human labour to create the means to produce clean, white illumination at the flick of a switch. Voluntarily turning that switch off is a “symbolic act”, all right – but I don’t think most people who do so understand just what it is that they’re really symbolizing.
They are soliciting participation in their fraud for a short time to gain acceptance from a public that likes reliable electrical energy over un-reliable energy offered by the green crowd.
They have already destroyed the best light bulb on the market and now they want you to sit in the dark for a short time to show support. A few words come to mind to describe this.
Charles Brecknell says:
March 10, 2012 at 12:45 pm
“As they point out, a healthy planet isn’t just good for polar bears but for all of us.”
“I’d like to make a polite, factual response to this- can WUWT readers help?”
The planet is pretty healthy. Polar Bears have increased in numbers since hunting was banned. Increased CO2 leads to higher plant growth, and even better, it enables plants to grow in drier climates, as they need less stomata. When CO2 is scarce, they develop more stomata to breath CO2, but this also leads to higher water evaporation. Hence, due to more CO, the Sahel zone is currently greening.
Here’s a very impressive demonstration of the effects, German video, the researcher visits the same spot in the Sahel zone for 30 years now and explains he has never seen anything like it – where there was desert, there are now endless areas of vegetation.
http://notrickszone.com/2012/01/03/der-spiegel-the-ground-zero-of-climate-change-is-becoming-green-expanding-sahara-is-a-myth/
Its a very clever marketing strategy which is trying to shame those people who do not participate. You can literally walk outside your door and recognise the sinners. In all probability, earth hour is being promoted in schools in order that the pupils might put pressure on their parents to participate in this religious celebration.
Don’t be fooled, and resist pressure from your children and friends. This represents the ECO foot in the door.
My wife and I spent the afternoon talking to two very pleasant Mormons and after three hours of good humoured discussion about their faith, they asked if they could say a prayor before departing.
This is the foot in the door and I quietly and politely told them that it would not be appropriate as we had not changed our position with regard to faith in or the existance of a deity.
Neverthless, it was a very interesting exchange and they are welcome to visit again.
Same methodology really.
No, earth hour is not worth any effort.
“Or is Earth Hour merely another exercise in self-satisfying slacktivism, achieving nothing more than the squishy “feel-good” objective of “raising awareness”?”
This. No doubt about it.
And maybe a measure of how many loyal followers does the religion have.
In Australia I switch on every light, especially outside ones, when the stupid ‘Earth Hour’ is proclaimed. What a ridiculous eco-fascist piece of propaganda!
Just lightbulbs?
bwahahahahahahahahahaha!!!
I have a better idea for these pretentious greenie’s.How about go to the home’s breaker box and shut the main disconnect switch to OFF for an hour.A whole hour just to see what it is like to go without electricity at all in the house.
I dare you to do it.
Well, since my wife & I don’t have air-conditioning (even less so in Winter) and the building has central forced water heat (whose electricity demands are probably on the order of $15/month, or perhaps $0.30 per person), our single largest electricity use is the fridge. I doubt unplugging permanently it will be terribly smart, & unplugging it for an hour would have no effect on our bill.
As far as light goes, it’s an obvious sign of civilization and human habitation, & has been for thousands of years. I’m pretty sure that’s what the Whirled Wildlife Fundus objects to.
Good article, Russ. To me slacktivism is good. Can you imagine what it would be like if Joe & Mary Average and their 2.1 children got serious about this catastrophic man-made global warming rubbish? Oh, and I’ll proudly be turning all my lights on during Smurf Hour to celebrate human achievement and to protest against UN/WWF/Greenpeace et al greenie policies denying the 3rd world cheap, reliable energy.
Most likely the minimal reduction in power use for that hour that faithful celebrate, would be more than offset by the increased power use as a result of preparation and stand down. Examples that come to mind, increased fuel used for traveling to and from related celebratory events, rescheduled activities that still occur but simply do so at another time and I’m sure there would be many more such examples. The difficulty with the examples mentioned of course is that they are far more difficult to measure, but probably exceed the bee’s diaphragm worth of savings due to earth hour.
Anyway I’m going to celebrate human achievement hour and do my bit get up the noses of the Gaian faithful.
I celebrate every earth hour the same way:
1. Turn on every light in the house
2. Put the oven on self-clean mode
3. Do some laundry
4. Take a soak in the outdoor hot tub
I like to turn on all the lights, and then listen to the Trace Adkins song “Every Light in the House is On” during Earth Hour.
“248 tonnes. That sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it”
CO2 is 11/44 carbon, and commercial bituminous should run about 70% carbon, add the phase of the moon and you get around 100 tons of coal, which is a bit over one railroad hopper car saved. Bunch of pikers compared to the savings North Korea makes daily.