On Saturday, March 24th, Earth Hour was held in every time zone around the world at 8:30 PM local time. I had already run an essay pointing out why Earth Hour is little more than a ridiculous feel-good exercise that does nothing but demonize the value of electricity bringing mankind out of the darkness and poverty.
The headlines as displayed by Google search, looked like this:
You’d think it was a success, except for those pesky people in British Columbia that didn’t want to sit in the dark as much as they did before. In the AP story in the LA Times, this was said:
In Paris, the Eiffel Tower went dark. In London, a kaleidoscope of famous sites switched off their lights — Tower Bridge, Big Ben, Piccadilly Circus, the London Eye. That scene was repeated over and over across the world Saturday night: at Sydney’s Opera House; at New Delhi’s great arch; at Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; at Edinburgh Castle in Scotland; at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin; at St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow.
It lasted for just an hour and its power is purely symbolic. But in countries around the world, at 8:30 p.m., people were switching off their lights for Earth Hour, a global call for international unity on the importance of addressing climate change.
But, while I agree it was “purely symbolic” (aka ridiculous feel-good stunt) those are all words.
To really show why Earth Hour is ridiculous, we need some hard data.
For that, I turned to the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) and their online web tool that tracks statewide electricity usage, here: http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
Here’s some screencaps of data from 3/24 at 8:30PM and 8:40PM California time. Note the inset box near the graph for the time and values. 20:30 is 830PM California time, right when Earth Hour is supposed to start.
Clearly, there’s not even a hint of the sharp hoped-for drop in electricity use the event was supposed to create.
Note there is hardly any difference in demand from 20:30 (8:30PM) to 20:40 (8:40PM) There’s a difference of 24,998MW at 8:30PM vs. 24,931 at 8:40PM. Proponents of the event might say that difference of 67MW in demand is “proof” of the success of Earth Hour.
Um, no.
CAISO also allows you to examine and compare the previous day of data, and that’s what I did and you can see in these two screen captures for 8:30PM and 8:40PM California time on Friday, March 23rd. Electricity demand for Saturday, March 24th is also displayed.
Yesterday, March 23rd, the total demand was 26,204MW at 8:30PM (20:30) and 26,081MW at 8:40PM (20:40) and the difference over that 10 minutes was 123 MW – nearly double.
So what that says that on a normal day, when Californians aren’t being told to turn off their lights to participate in the ridiculous stunt known as “Earth Hour” Saturday, they actually dropped nearly twice the electricity demand in those same 10 minutes on Friday.
Here is the data I downloaded from CAISO, you can check my findings:
CAISO-demand_03-23-24-18 (Excel file)
I suspect that if other data was examined around the world, we’d find similar results saying that Earth Hour had no discernible impact on electricity demand.
That lack of significant impact on electricity use during Earth Hour in California could be for one of two reasons:
- Participation could be essentially non-existent – people really don’t want to sit in the dark
- More people left their lights on (as I recommended) to protest the ridiculous stunt and muted the impact of the few who did turn off their lights and sit in the dark.
Let that sink in. Clearly, Earth Hour was a complete failure in the nation-state that supposedly leads the world in greenness and sustainability. If they can’t sell it in uber-green California, maybe they should just give up on the event.
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There’s a technical acronym for events such as earth hour: W.A.N.K.
I forget what the individual letters denote.
I would hesitate to guess. 🙂
So *that’s* the solution: Turn out the lights. I assume the Alarmists/Greens also do not want any new lights installed, so those poor people in the Third World can just give up their dreams of lifting themselves out of poverty.
I don’t think that will fly in the Third World. More, not less, they say.
I find example after example of energy waste for decorative purposes, which is well beyond the waste of having lights in you own home for safety and convenience. But I hear no protests over such things as decorative torches at restaurants that burn night and day. Couldn’t be bothered to even put a timer on them. I saw this near Disneyland on Harbor Blvd, in the heart of SoCal. Now why don’t they protest a waste of energy such as that, or a thousand more examples of waste. If this was so critical to mankind as they infer, every effort should be made to change behavior. But since even blatant waste is ignored, the whole CAGW movement is a sham and can be ignored by those that have not been brainwashed.
BTW, I love Red94ViperRT10’s name. Maybe I will change mine to ’09R/TClassicB5Blue.
I find it funny that they are mainly targeting lights for earth hour….this could also be why the movement is on the decline. Back when Earth hour started there were far more incandescent, halogen and other energy intensive light sources around then there are now. But no many private homes and commercial properties have converted to florescent and LED lighting, which use very little energy (LEDs especially).
So what’s a greenie to do? Maybe go after the real energy hogs in their homes and buildings, like refrigeration, air conditioning, electric stoves, electric water heaters, space heaters, etc. Also, flat screen tvs and monitors draw a lot of power as well….better shut those off!
But then again, if they killed the main sources of energy consumption for an hour, they’d have nothing to show. It would be kind of like in the Bible when Jesus admonished the religious leaders of his day for doing their alms in public. In other words, they weren’t being genuine but rather saying “hey everyone, look at me! Check out the huge sacrifices I’m making and look how pious I am!” All for show and that is that.
I forgot all about it. At least I was at a Hockey game, where they have to freeze the Ice and heat the building even though it was a Global warming high of 38 when the normal high for the day should be 48.The whole month of March has been colder than normal in these parts.
I was volunteering at a Lacrosse game. It was unusually cold for late March, we had to wear our winter coats. We have another winter storm forecasted for later this week. We could really use some of that global warming.
Some four (4?) decades ago after the oil collapse I flew across the Louisiana coast when the saying came out –“Will the last person leaving Morgan City please turn out the lights.” Air traffic was nearly gone, but they forgot. This was about the same time as bumper stickers– “…let them freeze in the dark.” If history repeats itself we will have a lot more wind machine fossils than we did then.
In British Columbia, power generation is mainly produced by a government entity, BC Hydro. Generation output from BC Hydro and private producers seems to be kept a secret for some reason. There is no site for the public to see generation output. One can see generation outputs in Alberta, Ontario, Germany, Australia, England to name a few but not in BC, why is that? What is the difference? Maybe hiding dismal out put from wind generation? Who knows.
Considering BC’s huge hydroelectric generation, why are you guys wasting money on wind?
B.C.’s electricity use actually increases 0.2 per cent during Earth Hour 2018. Nobody cares anymore about the empty ‘signal virtue’ of misguided environmental nut bars. Especially now that gasoline prices are approaching double what is just south of the border 25 miles away, because of extortionist protesters opposed to pipelines. And the Carbon Tax and excessive federal, provincial and municipal taxes on gas.
Price is now north of $1.56 Cdn a litre, or about $4.60 a gallon USD. And projected to go up now that the refiners are shut down for spring maintenance and conversion to summer fuel.
http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/b-c-s-electricity-use-increases-0-2-per-cent-during-earth-hour-2018
Anthony, I would suggest subtraction of the rows 4 and 5 for the two days. That kinda gives us an “anomaly” against the daily cycle.
There does a appear to be a tiny glitch and showing how small it is, is interesting.
I can’t be bothered wasting time with mickey mouse tools like spreadsheets, I’m not familiar and it is not something I want or need to learn. Someone familiar XL may wish to post a “chart” of the difference.
It does not last an hour either. IMO most people are doing it for 10 or 15 min then realise that they need electricity to function.
“If they can’t sell it in uber-green California, maybe they should just give up on the event.”
One part of me thinks its not nice to mock the Liberal mental illness that typifies those who want Climate Change awareness.
The other half, the half that is usually in control of executive functions, says they deserve all the derision, mockery, and scorn that can be heaped on them.
Here in Alberta, the daily peak was during Earth Hour! ☺
AESO chart from here: http://ets.aeso.ca/
Excellent to see. I didn’t hear anything about earth hour in the local news, so this isn’t too surprising.
Frankly, unless you are willing to turn off the main breaker for your entire house, I don’t think that you are actually participating. And with the cold we have been having here right now, that would have been a cold hour (Sorry, you can’t use your fireplace either, that produces the evil gas too.).
The market ultimately drives everything. I have worked on site investigations and cleanups for decades. I have always done the job faithfully but still take the attempt at quantification of risk to human health and the environment with a grain of salt, in other words I am pragmatic in my approach. I replaced all the lights in my house with LEDs, over 130 but I lost count. It was not to save the planet, I just got tired of replacing light bulbs. I probably save $5 a month in electricity and spent $1,000 on light bulbs. The economics of it is questionable until you add in the savings on time spent changing burned out light bulbs (including CFLs). I considered going solar, but when I realized you still get shut off in a blackout and you have to buy back power at night, it quickly lost its appeal. If battery storage isn’t such that I can go completely off grid, it isn’t worth it. An electric car is out of the question due to high expense and short range. All this angst over energy sources is meaningless. A new refrigerator might save me $90 a year in energy at most, which would never pay for itself and would result in wasting a perfectly good refrigerator. The long term answer is inevitable and has been with us for decades, geothermal and nuclear. There is no energy shortage and will not be for the foreseeable future, only a preference for energy sources. When greenies eventually tire of windmills and solar panels (which I learned in high school physics in the early 1970s cannot meet energy needs), we will be able to progress to practical energy sources. What is a great concern is that petroleum has many uses as materials as well as fuel (lubricants, solvents, asphalt, tar, plastic, synthetic fibers, organic chemicals to name a few). Finding substitutes for these will be difficult. Green insistence on converting to impractical energy sources with extremely limited energy potential is probably causing us to continue to burn petroleum as fuel needlessly. If Greenies want to actually solve our energy future, get behind geothermal and nuclear as energy sources.
It’s more than just labor savings, Jim. I went to the trouble to calculate total bulb hours per month in my home then total kWh/month for incandescent vs. LED lighting and the savings amount to $205/year. And I live in a low cost electric area (SD). In CA or NY it would be a lot more. If the LED’s really last 30,000 hours as claimed then the bulb cost is about the same or less and, as you point out, the maintenance time and effort are a lot less. In my case some of the savings are lost because I found I am a lot less obsessive about turning off lights with the LED’s. Not that any of it matters much to the planet since nearly all my power is from hydro.
Sigh. The takeaway from Earth Hour isn’t in the glowing (!) reviews or the minuscule amount of electricity saved. No, the terror is in who participated. The cited list did not include the headquarters of the Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, or any private endeavors who are free to behave as idiotically as they like. The exasperating thing is these edifices of human development are for the most part taxpayer funded which means the Enviros already have the control knobs of government in their grasping, nasty hands. And to be sure, if public education had Saturday night classes, the students would happily sit in the dark, along with Teacher.
Yeah, but just think — Al Gore’s energy bill went down from $30,000 to $29,995 this month!
One possible intended benefit of this Hour was to make greenies feel uplifted by noticing that there were others in their neighborhood like them—and perhaps encouraging connections among them. Another possible benefit was to nudge fence-sitters into “standing up and being counted” on the green side.
I’m astonished nobody but nobody gets this. Only creatures of the night like darkness. The other creatures hide because they can’t see anything like the creatures of the night can. And, we all know that vampires are creatures of the night. And, I happen to know that vampires exist. I have a sister; an older sister. That’s how I know.
Now do you understand? Earth Hour is really Vampire Hour. It’s an extra hour every year for vampires, who consider themselves our superiors, to sucker (appropriate verb) the little people into giving them even more; more time to suck blood out of their bodies. I say; Don’t fall for the scam. Yep, that’s what I say.
“But…but…but…It felt good! (Damn! I can’t see the outlet to recharge my Smartphone.)”
These kids don’t realize that if they get what they’ve been told they want, whether “sustainable energy” or gun bans, their future will change…and not for the better.
This is from last year, but it actually says:
At 8:30 p.m. your local time, turn off the lights for an hour and, through Facebook Live or a live channel of your choice, turn up the tunes using #EarthHourLive.
So, stop using electricity, and then use electricity to listen to bands who are using electricity, presumably with stage lights …
https://m.sfgate.com/entertainment/the-wrap/article/What-Is-EarthHour-and-Why-Are-All-the-Lights-Off-11027989.php
Yet another symptom that the political environmentalist bubble is long burst and it is losing even its virtue signaling value for the common leftist citizen.
I think all the virtue signalers have moved on to new issues. Guns, Trump, Opioids. Thing like that.
I had lived in a European country where the evening-lights-shutting was done as an experiment some 60 years ago. The no-lights lasted only a few minutes and was well coordinated to appear at 20:00 or such time with neighbors watching/reminding. Needless to say the analog gauges in the power-stations did not move. At the shutdown or reconnecting which was synchronized on and off (via radio).
In those days light bulbs consumed relatively large amount of household energy there not being TV, refrigerator …..
It is ridiculous to expect that lights would measurably impact the 465 000 000 000 W average US consumption (it is more in the evening).
Drat, I forgot about it too. I was going to turn on the light on my balcony just to be rebellious.
Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia when 2.2 million individuals and more than 2,000 businesses turned their lights off for one hour to take a stand against climate change.
And guess what? The climate, in spite of the best efforts of all these well-meaning, deluded ‘individuals’, is STILL changing!
Only one slight problem though. It isn’t getting warmer, as all the global warming useful idiots would have us believe.
Instead, it’s getting COLDER.
And this, notwithstanding the lion’s share of the carbon pollution (aka CO2, plant food) being released into the atmosphere by China and others (including Germany on a per capita basis).
Now who do you suppose might be behind making Earth Hour such a world-wide, rip-roaring success?
https://en.wwfchina.org/en/what_we_do/climate___energy/lclc/earth_hour/
No surprise there.
Ross McKitrick still has the best take on Earth Hour I’ve ever seen:
https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/earthhour.pdf
Well, NK celebrated all night and in fact every night.
Not to mention various African countries. If it’s good to shut down lights for an hour, then it must be even better to shut them down for a month, or year, or forever, yet for some reason most Greens aren’t willing to do that.
A lot of kids in west Africa read under street lights in the cities.
I don’t think Earth gives a shit what we do or think.
Thanks for this. My greenie, gun-hating, big-government-loving FB friends had a pic of their sitting around candles at a kitchen table (like Neanderthals at a fire in a cave, huddled against the elements). I didn’t know what they were doing. LOL
PS, Candles create CO2 too. You should let them know how they failed to satisfy GIA.
I would suggest the pretty red candles with the cinnabar inside like the craft ones used in California. It’s natural.
I forgot about it until I read Jo Nova yesterday. If I remembered I would have had every light blazing like I usually do. As Tim Blair says we should celebrate the fact we have such a wonderful thing as electricity and those beautiful coal fired power stations that produce it.