And that dumb day came again.. and no difference was made
March 29th, 2009
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Yes, Earth Hour has come and gone. It was the day for people to turn off their lights for an hour and light up their petrolium-derived candles, watch the stars while cooking on the propane or charcoal grill and wave to the helicopters dispatched to capture this glorious world spectical, proving once and for all how dumb humans can be.
Of course Earth Hour(tm) did nothing and may have even caused more electricity to be used due to the throttling of the grid that sudden load shifts cause.
Last year I wrote about it at greater length. Why not this year? And why not until it was over?
I didn’t want to contribute anything to the attention it gets or give it the dignity of a full blown post. It’s idiotic and the one thing it seems to be good for is advertising. A bunch of companies have “sponsored” Earth Hour, and thus they can join the crowd of idiots patting themselves on the back for what a good thing they did.
Here’s my post from last year. Consider it “recycling.”
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 12:51 am and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, Just LAME, Not Even Wrong, Politics, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 29th, 2009 at 12:53 am
Oh yeah.. I didn’t link to earth hour or any articles covering it either. Anyone who wants to see one can go hit up a search engine, assuming they don’t know what it is about.. which I’m sure everyone does. They sped a lot on advertising about this kind of thing… a lot that could be better spent elsewhere.
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March 29th, 2009 at 1:55 am
You made your points last year. Just linking to them is enough rather than feed this idiocy. You know it wants attention. It’s like a monster that eats intelligence. I saw some commercials for companies which sponsored it. Clearly a gimic and a poor one at that.
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March 29th, 2009 at 2:57 am
This is tokenism at its worse , and in the end counterproductive even if you don’t count the real price, which even the WWF is forced to admit are probably higher than the cost of the energy saved.
I propose that this observance be ‘celebrated’ in a slightly different way: Every Earth Day the power companies will randomly kill the power to various districts for an hour sometime during the evening without warning so everyone can get a taste of life with intermittent ‘green’ energy. This would be accompanied with lots of TV and radio ads driving the point home that this is what you are buying into with wind and solar. I’m sure this would do wonders to focus peoples mind on the issues.
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March 29th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Long overdue initiative, but I am wondering how many more Earth Hours can we expect to celebrate?
How do we calculate the environmental “sins of omission” and the economic “sins of commission” that have been foisted upon the Earth and the family of humanity in the first eight years of Century XXI? How will our children and history view this brief period of time at the outset of the new millennium when arrogant and greedy, self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe willfully and recklessly chose to “pad their own pockets” and, by their fraudulent efforts, take life as we know it and the living Earth down a descending, primrose path into darkness and to some colossal wreckage, the likes of which only Ozymandias has witnessed.
If the human community keeps doing precisely what we are doing now and not choose to make necessary changes, then a sense of foreboding overtakes me because the shameless Masters of the Universe will have ’successfully’ perpetrated a gigantic financial sham and left our children with a world – both ecologically and economically – in shambles.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
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March 29th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Steven Earl Salmony, here is a message for you: “No one has a right to complain about life because no one is compelled to endure it.” Who said that?
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March 29th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
mdf said:
Steven Earl’s bot didn’t read the post or it would have known that it was diametrically opposed to the way it’s master thinks. Just more Spam
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March 29th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
People who embrace self-congratulatory circle-jerks and reject useful action make me sick. I hope Steven Earl Salmony is just a troll and not an actual person but odds are he’s not.
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March 29th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
(The symbolism sent by “Earth day” is counter-productive; power down civilisation, save the planet. I celebrated Earth day with two 500 W halogen flood lights.).
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March 29th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Up here in the North, our Mayor was wildly campaigning for Earth Hour, and managed to obtain some dubious numbers about how much electricity was saved. Alas, like a typical politician, he doesn’t even understand basic thermodynamics, so when people here shut off their lights for Earth Hour, the Green Hydro electricity that they would have used was replaced by dirty, noxious, GHG emitting Fuel Oil, as their furnaces had to cut in to replace the heat loss of the electric light bulbs.
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March 30th, 2009 at 1:20 am
nfw said:
Yeah, although I doubt one hour of lights-out actually had that much of an effect on the work of the furnaces. A few 60 watt bulbs are only a small fraction of the heat a house typically uses.
But who’s doing the math of caring about actual impact, right? This is all about making people feel really good about themselves for doing absolutely nothing and then going to work the next day and telling their friends how they did without light for the good of the world.
In all probability, the reduction in load was so brief and small compared to the load profiles, that the governors on the generators of the world probably didn’t even take note. A few more gallons of water went over a spill way somewhere. The friction break that provides for ultra-fine control on some generators gave off a tiny bit more heat, somewhere a power grid fluctuated from 50.001 Hz to 50.002 Hz.
And the natural gas barons of the world smiled.
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March 30th, 2009 at 1:21 am
DV82XL said:
The sad thing is that this does not guarantee that it is a bot. Some commenters are real humans and they just read the headline, glance at a couple illustrations and perhaps skim the bold text… then leave a comment.
It happens all the time… not just here either…
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March 30th, 2009 at 4:04 am
Here is he post I left on a Yahoo list I subscribe to leading up to Earth Hour:
“Ah yes. Earth Hour.
This year I plan to celebrate Earth Hour in the following manner:
I shall put a full load of washing into the machine in time to have it ready to
go into the dryer at the commencement of Earth Hour. I shall leave enough time
for the hot water tank to reheat for the second load of wshing which shall start
at the commencement of EH as well. That way I’ll be utilising both the washer
and the dryer simultaneously.
I’ll make sure every light in my home is on.
All forms of electronic entertainment shall be running at maximum capacity and
volume, including televisions, computers, stereos and whathaveyou. If it can
suck juice, it’s going On!
Except for the stove, because you shouldn’t leave a hot plate or oven unattended
while it’s in operation, and I wont be home to watch over it. As soon as
everything is pumping along, I’m going down to the club.
The path of true environmental virtue is the exact opposite of what the
hairshirt greens, technophobes ‘conservationists’, ‘renewable’ energy advocates
and would-be genocidal neo-Malthusian human die-off sado-masochistic little
Hitlers want us to believe. The path to a decent and sustainable future for
humanity and the planet as a whole lies through massively expanded energy
consumption, high technology, increased personal wealth and choice, and an
unflinching respect for objective scientific knowledge.
I invite all readers of this post to join me in protest against the insidious
evil of Earth Hour.
Finrod.”
Except I didn’t end up going down to the club. Couldn’t be bothered.
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March 30th, 2009 at 9:35 am
I think Earth Hour was a wonderful thing. It showed people what they could do when they worked together and gave everyone the chance to be part of something they could be proud of and get a sense of accomplishment. It is not ofen that you get a chance for something you can do for the enviornment that is like that and that you can get that kind of feeling from. It goes to show what this can be if we can just take some more steps like this. It is good to organize people and the most importent thing that nobody mentioned is raising awareness. Kudos to everyone who did this. We still need to raise awareness around the world and everyone who helped do it deserves credit.
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March 30th, 2009 at 10:06 am
“I think Earth Hour was a wonderful thing. It showed people what they could do when they worked together and gave everyone the chance to be part of something they could be proud of and get a sense of accomplishment.”
It did? How?
“It is not ofen that you get a chance for something you can do for the enviornment that is like that and that you can get that kind of feeling from.”
Sitting in the dark for an hour seems to just be a way for you to not feel guilty about the 8765 hours in a year without actually having to get of your butt and do anything for the environment.
“It is good to organize people and the most importent thing that nobody mentioned is raising awareness.”
Everyone is aware of global warming. They either don’t actually care(like you) or they don’t believe it is occuring or they don’t believe that powering down civilization is a solution(like me. If you try to go down that road every last chunk of coal will be burnt).
I really do hope you’re a spam-bot and not an actual living person Megan.
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March 30th, 2009 at 10:47 am
earth-hour is a ploy to serve our need to be recognized and respected. It plays on our idea of self-worth while simultaneously creating a climate where real, challenging, change will be harder to make. Earth-hour deflates the ability for first-world society to look at climate change in any kind of real sacrificing light. Its not even a band-aid solution, its an abomination.
Stroke my ego harder won’t you!!!!
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March 30th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Earth hour seems a lot like Valentine’s day. One day per year to show your
partner you care. The rest of the year? Who cares….
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March 31st, 2009 at 12:27 am
Sydney just got hit by an irony meteorite.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090330/wl_nm/us_australia_power
I can only smile.
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March 31st, 2009 at 4:33 am
Sung Li Kim said:
Yes, quite! It’s all fun and games while you think you have a choice, but lets see how they feel after that choice is removed (as it would be under the kind of Green dictatorship the Earth Hour advocates so desperately want for the rest of us).
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March 31st, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Greetings,
I had a question about this and about Australia especially which is a big player in Earth Hour. According to a website on it, Australia gets almost all of their electricity from burning coal and because of this the emissions in Australia of both CO2 and harmful smog-producing pollutants are mostly from coal power plants. The site stated that Australia is planning on soon moving from one of the biggest users of fossil fuel for electricity to one of the lowest and cut their emissions more than in half by building something called solar draft chimneys.
It sounds really great but I looked at the numbers and it seems like something doesn’t add up. They want these things to be some of the tallest structures in the world and I know how difficult it is to build like that because they need tower cranes and crawling scaforlding to go up that high. Unless they have a new way of constructuon which I haven’t found anything about. If they want to replace coal then I assume they will need many of these because they said output is 200 megawats and I know a regular power plant can be more than 1000 megawats.
If I am not missing something major I am skeptical of whether this is all it is made out to be,
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March 31st, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Solar chimney generators are not all that they are cracked up to be. They consume a significant area of land, inefficient, and have rather long payback on investment. This and they have all the other issues that come up with solar energy.
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April 1st, 2009 at 1:02 am
DV82XL said:
The solar thermal chimney is actually able to do something quite impressive: It under performs other forms of solar energy!
The proposals for solar chimneys are absolutely enormous for a small amount of power. It’s just plain amazing that anyone takes it seriously. One proposal was for a 1000m tower and a 20 square kilometer greenhouse collection area. This would make it both the world’s largest covered area in terms of structural sprawl and at the same time make it the tallest structure, making it considerably taller than the Burj Dubai with nearly 200 meters over the top spire and considerably more from the roof.
This would generate… tada: 100MW
Another proposal called for a structure 750 meters tall and covering several hundred hectares. This would be technically a bit shorter than the Burje Dubai spire, although taller than the habitable floors of the building – still the tallest structure in Europe (proposed to be built in spain) and also a contender for the largest ground footprint of any structure.
And this would generate…. 40MW
Then there was a proposal for Africa for a tower that was 280 meters… IN DIAMETER and 1.5 to 2 kilometers tall – this would produce a reported 200 MW
This would of course be “Nameplate” but the towes are supposed to be able to produced near sustained nameplate output…. during mid summer… and a bit less than half in the off season.
So really it’s more like a 150 megawatt generator… that dwarfs the tallest structures in the world by a factor of two and encloses more ground area than the footprint of many cities…. Absolutely gargantuan for a piddly amount of energy.
My god, they actually make photovoltaic energy seem cheap and space effecient and that is an accomplishment!
What idiot would take this seriously has me scratching my head. I think it just falls into the “new and inovative” myth because it’s different than existing proposals (which are already being shown to not work.) Of course there’s nothing new about it. We’ve known for centuries that hot air rises, but our ancestors were too smart to think there was any point to this idiocy.
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April 3rd, 2009 at 9:08 am
Human reproduction does not occur by means of some magical process over which human beings have no control. Quite to the contrary, people know about “where babies come from.” It is for this reason that I am suggesting people can choose to take responsibility for this behavior. There are all kinds of incentives that could be deployed to encourage people to have “one child per family”, for example. This is only a guess but I believe adequate incentives would lead to rapid behavior change, the kind of change that would put the human community on the road to population stabilization/reduction. The idea that human population stabilization will occur automatically in the foreseeable future has been refuted by good science and shown to be a product of preternatural thinking.
Not only does human production not occur magically, we can see from voluminous evidence from the twentieth century — when there were two world wars and other ubiquitous armed conflicts, AIDS and other terrible diseases, pestilence, famines, natural and manmade disasters leading to great loss of life — that the global human population skyrocketed from 1.6 to over 6.1 billion people in that century alone. Please note that nothing served to stem the rapidly rising tide of humanity on Earth in the years between 1900 and 2000. It seems to me that human beings simply have to take responsibility for the propagation of our species {as well as consumption and production activities} because these activities could soon become unsustainable if they remain as unbridled as they are now.
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April 4th, 2009 at 2:55 am
Steven Earl Salmony said:
The only thing that seems to work in lowering the birthrate is to increase the standard of living first. Affluence in general leads to smaller families. This can clearly be seen in most Western capitalist countries where reproduction is being deferred/declined among the well-off young.
This is why most of us here believe that a nuclear-powered, cheap energy future is a superior objective to work toward, as opposed to the sort of world that the supporters of the stupid bit of tokenism that is Earth Hour represents.
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April 7th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
I liked the idea of Earth Hour, but not because it would do anything useful to reduce electricity usage. I’m a dark sky advocate, and I’d like to see more of these useless night-lighting projects switched off permanently. I sometimes wonder how much astronomical ignorance is due to the fact that most people nowadays don’t know what a dark sky really looks like. I hope a few people had the chance to realize just how beautiful the night sky can be, although really, not enough lights were turned off to make the sky *really* dark.
I think you’re right that increasing the standard of living is the best bet for reducing the birthrate.
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April 8th, 2009 at 10:42 am
COMMENT #23: “The only thing that seems to work in lowering the birthrate is to increase the standard of living first. Affluence in general leads to smaller families. This can clearly be seen in most Western capitalist countries where reproduction is being deferred/declined among the well-off young.
This is why most of us here believe that a nuclear-powered, cheap energy future is a superior objective to work toward, as opposed to the sort of world that the supporters of the stupid bit of tokenism that is Earth Hour represents.”
Ok. But, if the Earth is finite and humankind is rapidly dissipating Earth’s limited resource base as well as irreversibly degrading Earth’s environment, where will the resources and ecosystem services come from to SUSTAIN a human population that is fully expected to grow to 9.1 billion people a mere 40 years from now?
Consider that the Earth is not the cornucopia economists have told us it is. Economists are ideologues not scientists who have repetitiously stated what is clearly wrong about the way the world we inhabit works and done so many times. As a consequence, many too many people have ended up believing the specious ideas the economists have promoted so repetitively, dishonestly and duplicitously for the sake of their and their super-rich and powerful benefactors’ selfish interests.
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April 8th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Steven Earl Salmony said:
While the Earth’s resources are finite, it is unlikely that they will be exhausted in such a short time-frame.
First, the low-hanging fruit always goes first, so estimates on how much of any material resource is left tend to be on the low end. New technologies has gained us access to more difficult sources in the past and will likely to do so in the near future.
What constitutes a critical resource also tends to change over time, so it’s difficult to predict shortages without reliable knowledge of what is going to be critical.
Secondly, affluence leads to negative population growth, it doesn’t just slow it. Make the world rich enough, and the population will begin to shrink, if the experience of the ‘comfortable classes’ of the developed world are any indicator.
But even if it’s assumed your premises are true, it’s more probable that the future will devolve into a struggle for these resources between groups before voluntary rationing and voluntary birth-control are going to happen world wide.
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April 12th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Wonderful discussion. The ideas generated here appear vital to me. While I agree with everyone who says no one can predict the future, I also believe we can likely agree that if the human community keep doing precisely what we are doing now, we will keep getting what we are getting now.
One indication of faulty reasoning and extreme foolishness, I suppose, would be for us to believe that we can keep overconsuming, overproducing and overpopulating as we are doing now and somehow achieve different results from the ones in existence now.
If, for example, by doing “more of the same business-as-usual activities” that we are doing now, we could be leading our children down a “primrose path” to a recognizably horrendous fate of some unknowable kind, would reason and common sense not suggest a change in behavior?
We have self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us who are recommending to the children that all of us can live large and long; that we can conspicuously consume limited resources, pollute the frangible environment, overpopulate the finite planet and ravage the Earth……just the way they are insisting all of us do now. These arrogant and avaricious leaders are living examples of patently unsustainable lives and, yes, they take pride in their gigantic ecological ‘footprints’ and lifestyles based upon excessive consumption and unbridled hoarding. If our children were to keep doing what my not-so-great generation of elders are adamantly advocating and doing now, what is likely to become of them?
My growing sense of frustration results from a realization that remarkably clear, intellectually honest and morally courageous reports from so many responsible and duty-bound scientists show us that the Masters of the Universe are determined to deny what could somehow be real and not to speak publicly about what they believe to be true regarding the predicament in which the family of humanity finds itself in these early years of Century XXI. Even worse, their minions with leadership responsibilities and duties in environmental organizations have collusively been enjoined from speaking about whatsoever they believe to be true. As a consequence, a conspiracy of silence has been established among all these leaders and the absurdly enriched talking heads in the mass media who eschew intellectual honesty and moral courage in favor of reporting repetitively about whatsoever is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable and religiously tolerated.
The silence of so many leaders is deafening, while the duplicitous, disinformational chatter of the talking heads is morally outrageous. What is much worse, sad to say, is that the determination of these leaders and the talking heads to live large and long in such stupendously unsustainable ways — come what may for the children — is not only grossly irresponsible, it is a profound dereliction of their duty to warn, I believe.
Perhaps change is in the offing.
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