This, to me, and a lot of sensible people, is a crock of crap.
Because Earth Hour took place between 8:30 and 9:30 PM local time, it didn’t even take place all at once. It was piecemeal. It would never make any difference; people would still continue to use cars (burning valuable petroleum distillate!) and, apparently, phones were meant to be switched off too. This is ludicrous; why does turning your phone off for an hour make any difference? It’s all stored electricity anyway!
Even if any savings are made, it’s a totally ridiculously-small amount! Last year, the Sydney Herald equated the power savings to taking 48,000 cars off the road for an hour. That sounds impressive. However, when you think of this globally – as you need to do when it comes to climate change, as it’s not a local issue, this just equates to six cars off the road for a year. By which time, no doubt, thousands more would have been created using innumerable tons of carbon, and will constantly spit carbon (and other evil gases) out the back of them for years to come. It’s just stupid!
Candles – which people were urged to use instead - are also, if you think about it, bad for the environment, considering that they’re made of a great deal of petroleum too! This whole notion doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever! It even cost people their lives, when people drove recklessly in dark cities and crashed into people.
During the 2010 Earth Hour in the city of Uusikaupunki in Finland, a 17-year-old female motorcyclist hit a 71-year-old man, who was walking on the street instead of the sidewalk for an unknown reason. The man died from his injuries, while the motorcyclist and her passenger were uninjured. At the time of the accident the street lights had been turned off as part of the Earth Hour. (Wikipedia)
I’m pretty fed up of eco-Nazis telling people that technology will kill the planet, as is the general message of Earth Hour. Surely we should use technology to increase the efficiency of society? Though if you believe these environmentalists (remember the 10:10 group of eco-fascists who put out an advert implying that those who don’t agree or are sceptical should be blown up. Remember, “that’s your choice”), surely modern society is a stain on this great earth and we should live like primitives in caves, and not enjoy any modern luxuries or necessities. We’re all decadent pigs.
What’s even more disgusting is how people seem to be totally jumping on this bandwagon. These are usually middle-class softy liberals who are feeling self-conscious, and so jump on these sorts of pointless, glamour-seeking, substance-free “awareness raising” events just to make themselves feel better. These environmentalists don’t care about the planet; they just care about having their own piece of the planet looking nice and shiny while we all have to live in backwards conditions. But who cares, as long as they feel better about it, that’s fine.
Even YouTube got in on the act, with a “switch” to “turn off the lights” to promote Earth Hour. Now, this, like the whole Earth Hour notion, didn’t actually do anything meaningful in terms of conserving energy, but gave the impression of “turning out the lights” by making the YouTube page background – get this – black instead of white. Wow. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the power difference for an LCD displaying a black pixel as opposed to white absolutely negligible? Unless it somehow controls screen brightness (which is a system/hardware setting a website has no business fiddling with), it makes no power consumption changes. This is actually a good usability feature for their site, incidentally, and that’s nice; but to link it up with Earth Hour or say it’s otherwise saving the planet is absolutely hokey, and another instance of typical YouTube bandwagon-ry to boot.
Perhaps, as it was with the stupid Facebook cartoon character campaign, time to take the bull by the horns and make a real difference. Difference there was that donations to the NSPCC did increase.
I’m sure my environmentalist scepticism will prove interesting for the blog soon. I’m working on a follow-up to the Fukushima coverage from last time; let’s not go into that load of scaremongering and the collective orgasm heard from the environmental movement regarding that…
Oh, and get your “My Blog BELCHES Carbon” e-sticker here.
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