Dispatches from District 48
Posts tagged ‘earth hour’
Lots more updates but I have to get home from Buffalo first. Here is a funny quote
When the Earth Hour ambassadors include a child, a magician, a couple of actors, a singer, a model, a chef, a radio presenter, a celebrity gardener, a priest, a hotelier, a former rock star, a green politician, an SBS landscape architect and not a single economist or scientist, I think we’ve long stopped listening to “the science” and are checking out the designer label.
Ross McKitrick on "Earth Hour" via Bishop Hill
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.
Update: Here is the whole thing
Have you been reading all the follow-up stories documenting the huge cuts in electricity use during Earth hour? Yeah, neither have I. That is because there weren't any, at least in the US. Apparently our local Arizona utilities couldn't really find any statistically significant drop in usage.
But here is the embarrassing fact for the City of Phoenix, though the fact appears to be one year old:
The drop-off in participation might be tied to Phoenix not being a key participant like it was in 2008.
The city spent $3,000 in overtime for employees to run around and shut off lights last year, said the mayor's spokesman Scott Phelps.
We seriously paid for that last year? Unbelievable.
Somehow the lack of participation was spun in the article as "It was a global vote for action on climate change." Probably why I could never be a media flack - no way I could say that with a straight face.
By the way, the Coyote family celebrated Earth hour by consuming big slabs of methane-producing cow at Ruth's Chris.
Update: The feed header for the AZ Republic article linked above reads "Arizona shrugged off Earth Hour while much of the rest of the globe turned off lights Saturday night." Really? Much of the rest of the globe turned off lights? I must have missed the evidence, or even mention of this, in the article.
