This excellent essay on the Earth Hour event, to be held tonight at 8:30PM in every local time zone, is an eye-opener. Earth Hour is a testament to stupidity, in my opinion, and deserves to be mocked. North Korea reminds us what it is like to like in darkness, both politically, and in energy poverty.
UPDATE: In California, Earth Hour was a complete failure according to electricity use data.
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.
Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. – John Christy, director, UAH Atmospheric Science, Alabama State Climatologist
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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All of our electricity is hydro electric. The water flow in the rivers will not stop during earth hour, whether or not the water goes through the turbines or around them. Might as well make and use the electricity.
Earth hour 8:30 P.M. tonight. Lights out, abandon all hope.
Tonight there is darkness on Earth
Earth hour; for watt it is worth.
North Korea is right
It is dark: Earth’s delight.
The darkness shall cover the Earth,
Isaiah 60:2 For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.
Thanks for letting me know – I’ll wash clothes tonight instead of tomorrow.
Will also nudge up the thermostat a notch (it’s a little chilly in here). All lights on, of course (except the back door light – it has a feature that makes it come on only whenever something/someone triggers a sensor, and I’m not going to stand there and open the door again and again for an hour). Will put on the TV even though I don’t plan to watch it (thank God for “mute.”) I’d play the radio, too, but don’t have a non-battery one. Computer is on, of course.
I know it’s not much, but I’m trying to do my part. 😀
And THANKS, Prof. McKitrick!
Barbara
Your back door light: if you turn off the power to it and turn it on again within 10 seconds, it will stay on, for most products.
To reset it to normal function, turn off the power for more than 30 seconds then turn it on again. Almost all auto-on lights work this way. I think 20 seconds is the trigger line.
Earth provides soil, water, vines, grapes, and yeast.
The vines produce oxygen.
The grapes provide sugar.
The yeast manufacture alcohol and Carbon Dioxide.
A day without wine is like a day without sunshine.
Wine is sunshine in a bottle.
Earth is a fantastic thing.
We will celebrate Her tonight with a glass of wine.
Cheers.
We should all bow down to Nikola Tesla,
“let’s take a look at what Nikola Tesla — a man who died broke and alone — has actually given to the world. For better or worse, with credit or without, he changed the face of the planet in ways that perhaps no man ever has. ”
https://www.activistpost.com/2012/01/10-inventions-of-nikola-tesla-that.html
We know that he was undoubtedly persecuted by the energy power brokers of his day — namely Thomas Edison, whom we are taught in school to revere as a genius. He was also attacked by J.P. Morgan and other “captains of industry.” Upon Nikola Tesla’s death on January 7th, 1943, the U.S. government moved into his lab and apartment confiscating all of his scientific research, some of which has been released by the FBI through the Freedom of Information Act. (I’ve embedded the first 250 pages below and have added a link to the .pdf of the final pages, 290 in total).
I wounder were we would be if it wasn’t for people like this ????
I thought about buying a quart of whale oil and a lamp to celebrate the 18th century lifestyle this event promotes, but I could not find any for sale. So instead tonight I will turn on all the lights, and light the kerosene lamp I keep for power outage emergencies and drink a toast to old John D. Rockefeller and Tom Edison and George Westinghouse to thank them for seeing to it that I did not have to grow up in a house that stank of burning whale oil and required cleaning the lampblack from the lamp chimneys every few days.
Communism is Soviet power and electrification of the whole country.
The photos from space of the night earth dramatically illustrate how we waste our resources. Shade fixtures so the light shines down, where it is needed. And once again enjoy the stars!
Lights are on.
Also rented a Peterbilt and left it running – all night,
Yea Earth Hour!
I have replaced most of my incandescent and fluorescent bulbs with LEDs and proudly lit them to display my superior energy saving virtue.
The continued improvement in LEDs is stunning.
The green nutters believe that the day will come that LEDs, when switched on, will generate energy and light. All problems solved.
Is “Earth hour” widely known? Nothing in our nextdoor about it and most lights on in the neighborhood.
I’ve only heard about it through WUWT …
God bless your neighborhood and it’s common sense.
Once a year we have a litter pick in the village times just before the grass verges and hedgerows start growing in spring. This year we were snookered by snow falling the day before the litter pick, but each year it amazes and saddens me with the amount of rubbish, mostly thrown from cars, we find on the roadside. Cans, plastic bottles and sandwich wrappers. Last year I collected over three large bin liners with rubbish from a 400 yard stretch of roadside near my house. What’s lot of slobs our society has become! Yet the current issue du jour has become plastics that are polluting the oceans, started by David Attenborough’s programme Blue Planet 2. Maybe we should start by. Not throwing rubbish everywhere on land, before it makes its way to the oceans. (Rant over!)
+1000
8:30 PM is not a good time for me so instead I will turn off the lights when I go to bed. In anticipation of the event I made sure the lights were off before I left the house in the morning but I turned them on when It got dark because I did not want to have my dinner in the dark and I had some work to do on the computer. In the spirit of Earth Day, I will always try to turn off most of the lights in the house when I go to bed each night because we have all got to do our part. We also try to turn off lights when we are not using them so as to lower our electric bill. We are trying not to waste money.
Maybe suppliers of power should shut power and fuel off for a week (Atlas Shrugging). It wouldn’t be name by the gang green. It would be dubbed by most as Hell on Earth Week.
I’m going to leave the heat on too.
And eat a steak.