“The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.”
– Sir Edward Grey, at the start of World War I.
I can’t say it any better than Ross McKitrick in the Vancouver Sun:
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.
Regarding that last item, don’t give them any ideas. As Mark Steyn once wrote, “The ecochondriacs mean it: This’d be a pretty nice planet if we didn’t live here,” and Lebensunwertes Leben is yet another way for the far left to go forward into the past.
Earth Hour perfectly defines the theme of my recent “Forward Into the Past” video, not to mention Fred Siegel’s “Progressives against Progress” article, which I briefly quote in the video — since the 1970s, “liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria,” indeed. Or as Doug Powers writes on Michelle Malkin’s blog:
Here’s another reason I won’t participate in Earth Hour: I refuse to acknowledge, symbolically or otherwise, that electricity is the problem and that civilization can be saved by turning itself into North Korea for any length of time.
But it’s also worth flashing back to the Silicon Graffiti I did in 2009 on this pagan Bizzaro World “holiday:”
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.As I noted back then, check out in the video how nicely illuminated Sydney’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore is during her Earth Hour interview. Funny, you’d think somebody who actually took her own beliefs seriously would have insisted that all lights, including those used by AP’s cameraman be shut off.
Speaking of shutting off the lights, as of the time of this post, YouTube has a silly light switch icon, which will flip your browser from white to black, plus, appropriately enough, a broken-appearing light bulb icon to commemorate Earth Hour. But shouldn’t they shut the site down completely to celebrate? Do it for Gaia, boys — no 404, no peace, maaaaan!
If you’re going to reprimitivize, reprimitivize.
Related: “Irony is dead or at least it’s lookin’ pretty Green.” Especially on Spa Night.
Update: “Celebrating the power of reason to conquer the forces of darkness.”
(Bumped to top.)
I just completed “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human” by Richard Wrangham. The hypothesis is that learning to cook, i.e., use energy to transform our food into a more nutritious and digestible form, is what facilitated human evolution. We humans depend on external energy to survive, it is not an option for us to not use external energy, for warmth, for cooking, for survival. We cannot flourish on a raw food diet, even high density raw food from modern energy using farms and ranches, as cooking food permitted the reduction in the size of our gut so that the energy could be used by our brains in development. So Earth Hour is really symbolic human suicide, a death cult.
Every single time ‘Earth Hour’ rolls around, I harken back to an ancient blog-save by Dale Amon over at Libertarian Samizdata. With what I will assume to be the permission of the homage, I reprint much of it here, as I thought it quite extraordinarily eloquent, and have forwarded it to more than a few people -
————-
The Dying of the Light
[famous 'earthlight' photo of all of earth seen at night.]
I never get tired of looking at this photograph. It never fails to fill me with wonder and awe at the ingenuity of my species who, against all the odds, have carved these glorious man-made islands of light out of the primordial blackness. Whenever I am heavy of heart, I open up this photograph and stare at it to remind me that, somewhere, there is light and life.
And there is. For now.
Towns and cities around the world are turning out the lights for an hour to highlight the threat of climate change.
….
With each passing day I become more convinced that the ‘green’ movement is actually a millenarian psychosis; a mental and spiritual sickness borne, perhaps, from some degree of civilisational exhaustion. Not just a belief that the end of the world is nigh, but an active desire to bring it about. And soon. Ours is not the first age to witness such pandemics of madness but, in the Middle Ages at least, there was the excuse of a near-universal poverty. In such a state of interminable plight, despair may not be the wisest response but it is at least an understandable one.
But now we live in an age of near-universal prosperity and progress. Never before has our species enjoyed such security and such freedom from want. Yet this is clearly no defence against a recurrance of this psychological plague.
….
‘Stop the world, I want to get off’ was the plaintive refrain of some Broadway comedy show I think. It could also be the motto for the greens, except that they want everybody off. Is that what they aspire to as they sit at home quietly in that seductive, undemanding cloak of blackness? To switch off civilisation and shuffle away into the perpetual tenebrosity dragging everyone else behind them?
The conditions are ripe for the spread of this insanity. Indeed, it is spreading now. How long will it be, I wonder, before some official body somewhere floats the idea of mandatory blackouts and curfews? “The voluntary approach” they will proclaim, “has not worked”.
And what do we do in response? Laugh at them? Ignore them? Rage against them? What would work to inoculate the rest of our species? What combination or words or phrases could we use to dissipate and lay low a viral madness? I am, of course, familiar with the customary rebuttals. “We will win because we have MTV and Coca-Cola”. But without the light there is no MTV, there is no Coca-Cola. What do we have then?
The lights are not yet going out all over the world. But I fear that I will see them do so in our lifetime.
The browser darkening is particularly idiotic — all about symbolism (magical thinking?) without saving *anything* at all, note even a few watts of power.
Why?
A backlit LCD monitor (whether it is cold cathode fluroescent, or LED) only shows blacks by changing the piezeoelectric charge on individual pixels to block the light coming from behind the LCD* — the light is fully on, just hidden.
*Some of the ‘LED’ TVs (really just LED backlit LCDs) have actual dimming of the backlight, as a contrast enhancement gimmick in darker scenes, but I don’t know of any PC monitors doing it.
this whole charade gets way more ink than it is worth.
I wish people would just ignore it.
This article made me laugh at the sheer ignorance and narrow-minded viewpoint. To say that you are missing the point is such an understatement, I’m not sure it’s even worth the debate. Earth Hour is not against electricity – it is against the perpetuation of DIRTY electricity!
Ed Driscoll, one day you will be forced to wake up and see the bigger picture and hopefully you will think twice about posting such unhelpful drivel. Resources are running out and “cheap and abundant” is a thing of the past. If you think the poor people can afford the cost of electricity at its current rate of inflation, you’re crazy. Do you really think the economy can keep growing when ALL resources (the free fodder of the economy) are in a state of decline? Renewable energy is the only way to go – once you’ve bothered to join the dots, you’ll find that it’s just logic and common sense!
Earth Hour is also not about saving electricity, it’s about awareness of a developing crisis that will hit at the poor way before those of us who continue to squander resources as if they will magically never run out.
Hi Robin,
Wouldn’t getting off the Internet be a great first step towards saving resources?
Ed
Hi Ed,
Playing the tiresome hypocrite card (yawn) is always the first recourse for someone who can no longer debate the issue constructively. And once again you’re missing the point – it’s not about regressing, it’s about progessing differently.
But you’re right, I could go and camp off the grid on a tiny alien-infested, infertile square metre of land next to a poisoned and lifeless stream, and I may even survive, but I believe that unless you’re part of the man-made system, you can’t contribute towards changing it.
Robyn
Hi Robin,
So you’re angry at someone arbitrarily telling you how to consume your resources? How ironic!
Ed