Every year at Christmas, many newspapers reprint “Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus“, this excellent essay by Ross McKittrick should be repeated on every blog on every observance of Earth Hour. Copy, paste, and share it widely. A poll on what you plan to do to observe this event follows.
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
Image via Wikipedia
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
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UPDATE: MSNBC is running a similar poll here. It seem “Human Achievement Hour” has been noticed.
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I think I just realized why Earth Hour is in March rather than in April. Imagine if it would fall on April 1st? 😎
WooooHoooo!
One hour to go until Earth Hour.
Can’t wait to obliterate 10kW for a total cost of $2.10 AUD.
My son is an apprentice electrician. Tonight he will drive 40mins from our home to a major bridge in Brisbane (Australia). He will open a switchboard panel and turn off 4 switches. This will turn off the pedestrian lights and the decorative lights on the bridge. The road lights and navigation/warning lights for aircraft and watercraft will be left on.
He will play games/watch videos on portable battery powered devices for an hour and then he will turn the 4 switches back on. The bridge will again look pretty with its decorative lights. And then he will drive home.
For this little gig, the Ratepayers (Taxpayers) of Brisbane will pay him for minimum 3 hrs work at double time. There are at least 4 other electricians turning off power to bridges and parks tonight in Brisbane – could be more.
I can’t help thinking that if they were serious, the decorative lighting would be turned off permanently. But I guess this is a media event – tomorrow there will be pictures of the bridge fully lit and then darkened. Empty gestures!
Obviously the developed nations rely on fossil fuel powered electricity. While accepting that the negative effects of co2 emissions are probably exagerated, I would prefer some sort of international effort be made to implement nuclear powered electricity generation in developing nations. Some sort of scheme should be set up so that for the cost of a fossil fuel powered station a nuclear power station be installed instead. Countries with abundant uranium like Australia and Canada could set up schemes to provide fuel and take the waste. Developed countries with existing fossil fuel plants should keep those that have already been built. Instead of wasting money on wind/solar power, the money could be used to support such a scheme, which would deliver significant reductions in co2 emissions.
And don’t forget THE MAN himself when men were men and women were mighty glad of it-
http://www.teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla-books-the-man-who-invented-the-20th-century-by-robert-lomas
On their website it says that Earth hour is at 8.30pm, yet their clock counts down to 5pm, wuwt? Not that it makes any difference, as I’ll be going out for a meal with friends and won’t be saving the planet this week.
David, UK says:
March 31, 2012 at 1:42 am
Re my last comment: silly question. I forgot this was a trivial gesture. The BBC will probably just broadcast in the dark for an hour.
Considering their devotion to the Church of AGW, I’d say they always broadcast in the dark!
My sentiments exactly……. My light will be on in a celebration of an “Hour Of Power”…… The coming of the light.
I will not crouch in darkness and ignorance for anyone.
Ross’s thesis leads to another point. When the activists attribute costs for burning fossil fuels in power plants (deaths from lung disease, warming of the atmosphere, etc.), they never net the societal benefits. Sort of like misstating financial statements.
Peter_ Ga…… You don’t need to reduce CO2. CO2 is not a pollutant. There is no evidence that Anthropogenic CO2 has a significant effect on climate…. to the contrary it there is plenty of evidence that suggests Anthropogenic sources of CO2 are insignificant in their effect.
The developing world is better off using coal and gas for electricity production. The modern Western coal or gas fired power stations are extremely clean burning. Scrubbers are very efficient at removing sulphur compounds and other pollutants.
I agree that Nuclear power technologies must be developed, for that is the energy source of humanity’s far flung future….. But it will be hundreds of years before human society needs to rely on nuclear power generation as a replacement for hydro carbon based fuels.
I like McKitrick’s idea of Earth Month. (sans the terrorist attack on the hospital) All of us would be so thankful when the power came back on. It would be fatal to “the cause.” More potent than any rhetoric. Make it mandatory.It would be the environmentalist’s last will and testimony. It would be their last exercise of political will.
peter_ga says : “the negative effects of co2 emissions are probably exagerated”
CO2 — It is All Good.
http://www.co2science.org/education/book/2011/55benefitspressrelease.php
Great piece. I agree with the annual reprint.
Glad I looked at WUWT this morning. I might have missed Earth Hour all together. In the US EDT it happens during the NCAA basketball semifinal. Now, which is more important?
I sometimes can’t fathom the enviro’s. It is a sign of wealth and a life of relative comfort, wealth and idiocy that they can preach the things they do. I also notice that the most fervent enviro doesn’t give up his comfort. I was 10 (1957) before I slept in a bedroom that was heated. I didn’t really suffer because feather beds and quilts handled the eastern NC winters, but one learns not to dawdle getting dressed when you wake up with snow on the covers. We had indoor plumbing but some of my relatives didn’t. Some got water from pitcher pumps, sometimes the pumps were even in the kitchen. Farm work was a bit less machine assisted way back then. I didn’t have AC until the ’70’s. I remember folks in iron lungs. Not much before my time, no electricity meant that you didn’t eat a lot of fresh or “fresh frozen” foods. My son was born with an atrial septal defect (blue baby). In the ’80’s the surgery wasn’t that big a deal. In the ’50’s it was. I didn’t suffer from the life without all the modern conveniences way back then, but life expectancy was lower, people lived much harder lives, the water and air were more polluted. My cell phone has about as much, or more, computing power than the IBM 370 I used getting a doctorate in x-ray crystallography.
All this made possible by the growth of cheap, abundant and available energy. And the environmental loons want to feel guilty and get in their way back machines to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear. Neither my mother nor grandmother thought the good old days were all that good and they certainly didn’t want to go back. My mother said that she was going to spend my inheritance staying warm in the winter and cool in the summer and when that ran out, she’d be knocking on my front door. 🙂
I first came across Ross McKitrick’s excellent essay a couple of years ago, and send it to my warmiest pals on this day each year. It makes them very, very angry, but this mainly seems to be because they are quite unable to disagree with any of the individual propositions in it.
When I ask them why it upsets them so much, they just splutter stuff like “the whole thing is just wrong!!” Yet going through it line by line, they cannot seem to identify specifically where the problem is.
Congratulations, Ross McKitrick. This devastating critique hits the nail on the head with style and panache. If there is an Earth Hour next year, it will be doing the rounds again.
Many of the things you say are correct but for energy in general, not just for electricity.
Under the current tax structure and an inelastic energy marketplace, government has a self interest in maintaining high energy prices. Higher prices generate higher energy business profits and therefore higher income tax revenue on those profits. That places government squarely against the expansion of energy resources and therefore against us the consumers – the voters.
I have a very simple idea that would dismantle that linkage and radically alter government’s position into one championing low prices, more competition and higher energy utilization – completely abandon taxation of corporate energy profits and instead collect only a PER UNIT ENERGY TAX.
For vehicle fuels the taxing infrastructure is already there right at the pump in the form of the highway tax! Instead of taxing Exxon’s profit which just gets tacked on to the price at the pump anyway, tax only the fuel itself at the pump. If government collected say, (I’m guessing at the number), an additional 20 cents per gallon at the gasoline pump instead of taxing the equivalent amount that would represent the tax on Exxon’s profit.
With that model the government will want us to find ways to utilize MORE energy not less. They will be on our side to increase competition as a means to LOWER energy prices. They will favor opening more federal land and off-shore reserves for exploration. It would put government back on OUR side of the equation.
(Yes, this idea will smother government interest in fuel efficiency but that was, is and will always continue to be in the self interest of the consumer in a FREE market. )
MindBuilder says:
March 31, 2012 at 1:35 am
Speaking as an electrician, if your electrics aren’t designed to cope with having everything on then they’re functionally inadequate and consequently dangerous. An older house can be forgiven for having inadequate wiring but anything built in the last 15 years should have been designed to provide enough slack for every room to have all its lights on and a major appliance running in each one. It’s simple safety; more to the point it’s written in the regs, and I stick to those particular regs like glue because I don’t want my work causing house fires.
Translated into Spanish and posted in my blog, then twitted and facebooked:
http://goo.gl/CXb4R
And to all you radical liberals out there – coal saved our forests and crude oil saved the whales.
Energy Hour – Switch on all the lights
A tribute to the miners, drillers and energy workers around the globe who do a dangerous job providing the electricity and energy that enables our modern living standards.
Apart from electricity certainly NOT being cheap in Australia, you certainly don’t seem to understand the reason behind Earth Hour, which is far more about A: overuse of and getting people thinking about it B: and the production / fossil fuels etc.
Also a mere hour will not hurt at all. The following excerpt, shows you are also steeped in a sexist way of thinking, for a start. Once again, it IS only an hour… your whole attitude is not even in line with the whole global ideal of carbon footprints.
“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”.
I could rave on more, but I’ll leave it there.. to think you teach, anywhere… is beyond me… chauvinist, and obviously not concerned on the future of our planet.
Sasha
It would also not surprise me if you disallowed the prior comment… as it is ‘anti’ your post, and I’m a female… Have a Happy Day.
“peter_ga says:
March 31, 2012 at 2:44 am”
I think you need to do some more research regarding Uranium reserves. If all power was derived from burning Uranium, the reserves in Australia alone would last only 35 years or so. That’s not a good prospect. There’s ~500 years of discovered coal reserves in Austalia alone. Time to stop being silly with the CO2 bogeyman, use it while developing Thorium.
Don’t give Earth Hour the oxygen of even protesting against it. Just ignore it and it will go away.
I had a large group of friends over to celebrate my birthday and it was never once mentioned in the conversation.
I’ll be installing some incandescent bulbs in honor of
earth energy hour…Can we adapt Dylan Thomas? Don’t go gentle into that good night/…/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.