The New Endarkenment

Don Surber notes one of the many, many ironies in the latest annual attempt for the Rousseauvian re-primitivized left to Visualize Industrial Collapse:  “watt for watt, paraffin candles emit 10 times as much carbon dioxide”:

Ah yes. Good intentions.

The photo above is by Kate Geraghty of the Sydney Morning Herald, where it is already Sunday and where people have already celebrated the Earth Hour of turning out the lights for an hour and turning on candles.

Welcome the return to the Dark Ages; this time it will work.

So, was any carbon dioxide saved?

Noted the Christian Science Monitor: “As Australian blogger Enoch the Red pointed out after last year’s Earth Hour that an average Australian who tries to replace all the light produced by an incandescent bulb with light cast by parrifin candles will result in about 10 times the greenhouse emissions.

“But of course most of us aren’t going to burn 40 candles for every bulb we leave off. The idea here is to make our cities and towns go dark for an hour, not to create a major fire hazard.”

So what is the point?

It is just another empty gesture by people who do not know what they are talking about.

The eco crowd seems to do a lot of that.

Indeed they do–I’ve mentioned the 12Seconds.TV concept before–including in my recent video about Twitter. It’s an attempt to create a sort of video equivalent of Twitter. With the latter, the cut-off is 140 characters; with 12-seconds TV, the limit is a temporal one. It’s kind of a fun idea and harmless; but in my subscriber email last week was this:

Dear 12ers,

We are proud that 12seconds is an international phenomenon.  As our inspiration and great friend, Documentally, regularly points out, we often forget our friends on the other side of the pond as we talk incessantly about boring “American” issues.  Luckily, one of our favorite 12ers took the time to remind us and it got our attention.

Make a 12seconds Commercial for Earth Hour

Take 12seconds to do something fun and meaningful.  Make a 12 for Earth Hour.  Earth Hour is an incredible event that happens at 8:30PM local time on March 28th wherever you you live on the planet Earth.  Everyone turns off their lights for that 1 hour, all over Earth.  It’s an important event and one we’d like to ask you to support.  We’d like you to use your creativity to provide some awesome 12s that Earth Hour can use to promote the event.

This is from 12er, jjprojects:

“We’d love to tap the creative powers of 12seconds to show people what to do during Earth Hour. Give us your best 12second practice run – video by candlelight, flashlight, mobile phone glow, blindfolded, sitting in zen-like state, whatever it may be!”

Check out the Earth Hour Page on 12seconds and, please help!

So let’s consume the batteries in our camcorders or cell phones, plus the electricity powering our computers, plus the electricity powering the servers which host these videos, plus the servers which route other computers to them, to celebrate a return to our pre-technological past. But then, all religions, even post-Christian examples, have their rituals which seem strange to non-believers.

In between his own coverage of the Endarkenment, as always, Tim Blair spots the upside:

Whenever someone makes an epic attempt to reduce their environmental impact, they always write a book about it.

Or blog the daylights out of it, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Me? I’m celebrating Edison Hour.

Update: “God said, ‘Let there be light.’ Who are we to argue?” Meanwhile, Maggie’s Farm asks:

How will you celebrate Earth Hour tonight? Had I a Hummer, I’d take it out for ice cream.

Make it a black Hummer, to really cheese off the eunuchs in Sacramento.

More: “Tonight At 8:30, Celebrate Human Achievement Hour–Unless, you know, you’re one of those people who doesn’t believe in human achievement.”

Update: Not surprisingly, Reuters Laphamizes their “report” on “Earth Hour.”

Update: More Earth Hour video madness here.