Auf Wiedersehn, Global Warming

In the Telegraph, James Delingpole writes, “When the Germans give up on AGW you really do know it’s all over…:”

No people on earth are more righteously Green than the Germans. They built the foundations and set the tone of the modern Green movement in, ahem, the 1930s. They invented the phrase Atomkraft Nein Danke. They were the first country to allow nasty, dangerous Sixties eco-radicals to reinvent themselves as respectable politicians. They were the first place to buy, wholesale, into the solar power con, which is why so many of their rooves – especially on churches – shimmer and glow like reflective-coated crusties at a mid-Nineties rave, while the German taxpayer is ruing the day his government ever chose to subsidise (Achtung Herr Cameron!) this fantastically pointless scheme… (Hat tip: Robert Groezinger, et al)

So when the Germans say “Auf Wiedersehn AGW” it really is time for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice. And that’s exactly what they just have said. See for yourself in this tear-inducing glorious feature in one of their leading newspapers.

As far as I could see, “Earth Hour” was not an eco-holiday celebrated or even mentioned on the cruise ship I was onboard last week. But as Australia’s Andrew Bolt writes, “Who knew being a saint could be this easy? Even a moron can now manage it, and — as we saw again last weekend — morons try:”

Switch off your lights, and you’ve saved the planet.

Have a dance, and you’ve made poverty history.

Walk over a bridge, and you’ve ended Aboriginal suffering.

Or you can do all three at once – dance on a dark bridge – and usher in Paradise itself.

But hurry with that, because last Saturday’s ooga-booga Earth Hour made us seem stuck instead in a Hell of the smug and lazy.

Earth Hour. Could there be a better symbol of this feckless age in which seeming counts for more than doing? In which we pose as noble for having done something as pointless as it’s painless?

If I really thought man’s gases were heating the world so dangerously that, as Al Gore says, “the future of human civilisation is at stake”, I’d feel the call to do more than turn off some lights for just one hour a year.

But, no, on Saturday night, tens of thousands of your fellow citizens made a huge show about how good they were to do for one hour what they couldn’t be bothered doing for the other 8759.

So to save the planet from apocalyptic global warming, the lights on the Sydney Harbour Bridge were turned off. For one hour.

To save the planet from frying, government buildings were dimmed. For one hour.

Here and there, the houses of green activists went dark. For one hour – and even then the fridge was left running, because we can’t let the peas defrost just to stop Armageddon. I mean, be reasonable.

You see, this is really just about seeming, not doing. About “raising awareness”, and not actually fixing what we’re suddenly aware of.

And so the Sydney Swans and St Kilda couldn’t give up their floodlit, interstate night game for Earth Hour, but did congratulate themselves for at least getting the ANZ Stadium to turn off two external signs. For one hour.

Likewise, Victoria’s V/Line couldn’t stop its gassy trains from running, but did with pride advise customers on its website that to save the planet they could “start a worm farm”.

And the Victorian Government, while happy to tell staff to turn off a few unnecessary computers for that one hour, couldn’t bring itself to cancel the next day’s choke-on-this orgy of gassy fun, the Formula One Grand Prix.

The results of Earth Hour were just as pitiful as you’d expect, of course.

In the States, rather astonishingly, Wachovia paid lip service to the weird “holiday.” That’s good to know if you’d like to maintain some distance between your banking and pagan pseudo-religiosity:

Related: “You Don’t Need to Be a Weatherman but It May Help.”