Sitting around in the dark might be good for reflection, unless you’re a ray of light.
You might’ve missed it, but Earth Hour occurred Saturday, March 29. People in cities across the globe were to turn out the lights for one hour to help fight climate change.
Now I favor reasonable conservation on the personal and institutional levels, but something about “Earth Hour” reminds me of the old schoolyard taunt about how so-and-so is so dumb it takes him two hours to watch 60 Minutes. This is one “hour” that must have dragged on a mighty long time for some well-meaning but misguided participants.
As I’ve said before, we don’t need to sit in the dark and give up modern conveniences to fight climate change. A cap & trade system that reduces greenhouse gas pollution and leads to new clean-energy innovations will allow us to stop climate change and keep the lights on at night when we need them, thank you very much.
Andrew Bolt, a columnist at Australia’s Herald Sun, recently addressed the real effects of Earth Hour in Australia. It seems that when Aussies sat in the dark there was no noticeable decline in their power usage. I’d bet the results were similar here in the states.
Stunts like this get headlines and make people participating in them feel good, I guess. But in the end it’s still just a stunt, which does little to make the reality of climate change a pressing issue among lawmakers and others who can make a difference through policy change. It certainly does nothing to attract optimistic, can-do climate-committed conservatives who favor breakthrough innovation for our energy challenges – and who are probably smart enough to altogether avoid 60 Minutes.
This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Climate Change, Pop Culture . 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.
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Hey thanks for the great blog, I love this stuff. I don’t usually do much for Earth Day but with everyone going green these days, I thought I’d try to do my part.
I am trying to find easy, simple things I can do to help stop global warming (I don’t plan on buying a hybrid). Has anyone seen that http://www.EarthLab.com is promoting their Earth Day (month) challenge, with the goal to get 1 million people to take their carbon footprint test in April?… I took the test, it was easy and only took me about 2 minutes and I am planning on lowering my score with some of their tips.
I am looking for more easy fun stuff to do. If you know of any other sites worth my time let me know.