WWF’s Earth Hour: put that bloody light out!
It’s the World Wildlife Fund’s Earth Hour this coming Saturday…
On Saturday 28 March 2009 at 8.30pm, people, businesses and iconic buildings around the world will switch off their lights for an hour – WWF’s Earth Hour.
We want a billion people around the world to sign up and join in.
[...]
Every single person who signs up to WWF’s Earth Hour sends the message that they want action to tackle climate change!
Sign up here. Get your groovy blog widget – like the one up on the top right – here.
The cynics and climate change deniers will no doubt call it an empty gesture when really those of them of a romantic bent should be enjoying the amazing spectacle and the rest can copper up the money they’re saving sitting in the actual as well as rhetorical darkness.
People of all persuasions, I beseech you, it’s a moment we can all come together and savour.
Posted on March 23rd, 2009 at 7:10pm under Activism, The coming apocalypse
Added it to my sites but couldn’t get it to work on blogspot at first. Adding a couple of ‘;’s worked though (after “utm_medium” and “utm_campaign”). Just in case anyone else has trouble, y’know
[...] Chicken Yoghurt, I am reminded (reluctantly) about Earth [...]
I’m neither a cynic nor a denier, but I still think it’s an empty gesture. Assuming you’re using CFLs, turning your lights off for one hour going to save about 0.01 kWh per lamp. Unless you’re Blackpool Illuminations, it’s not even a drop in the bucket.
And what’s the betting that a lot of the people involved will be sitting by candlelight whilst congratulating themselves? Candles are less energy efficient than incandescents. Oh yes, here we are:
“As well as switching off your lights, there are many ways you can get involved. Why not host a candlelit dinner party? We have menu suggestions, top party tips and fundraising ideas.”
Brilliant! All your mates can drive round and eat imported food by candlelight whilst congratulating yourselves on saving barely enough energy to toast a bagel between the lot of you (2kw toaster for 2 minutes = 0.06 kWh). So, empty and counter-productive. Just brilliant.
Come on. It’s publicity not policy.
Fine, but is there any chance they could chose a publicity stunt which isn’t actively counter-productive with regard to the issue they’re trying to publicise? It’s like protesting against seal clubbing by clubbing seals.
Most people using the Internet already sit in darkness don’t they?
That might explain some of teh keyboard skills.
Self congratulatory smug middle class bullshit that doesn’t change anything. Like the “take a sweater to work” day we had here last month.
Less p.r. stunts, more activism!!!1!
Less p.r. stunts, more activism!!!1!
So how do you propose to recruit the activists? What with these awareness campaigns being such self congratulatory smug middle class bullshit and all.
[...] I’m at a wedding today, so won’t be in my house to participate in Earth Hour. That’s doesn’t mean that all you non-wedding guests can’t do it though, does it? (via) [...]
We just emerged from our hour of darkness; playing board/card games by (*gasp*) candlelight. Best fun we’ve had as a family for ages.
A good awareness campaign, I’d say; our kids found out that they’d been taking electricity somewhat for granted, and so did us adults to a slightly lesser extent (we were awake for both recent blackouts).
Questions about what did and did not count in the turn-off (“Does watching TV in the dark count?”) also led to a discussion about what chews electricity.
Dunc might like to pop around to my house and count how many electricities we don’t use over the next month, purely as a result of the youngest discovering (at last!) that electrical light isn’t free and most switches don’t turn themselves off.
Salt beef, preserves and drying your clothes with the mangle when it’s raining from now on is it Tim? Can’t be running that freezer or tumble dryer. Your computer is powered by a pair of electrodes rammed into a potato no doubt. Or were you simply reckless before? Some of us were frugal by both inclination and pressures of the wallet. We didn’t need no patronising gesture to save energy.
Tch. It must be dreadfully colourless in that black and white world of yours.
And it took this to get that message through? Well, I don’t have any kids, so I generally try not to criticise other people’s parenting, but… Really?
I still think that switching off your highly-efficient (and hopefully renewably-powered) electric lights in favour of burning petroleum by-products in the least efficient way possible is a fundamentally stupid way of raising awareness about climate change.
Oh, yeah… I totally trust you to explain that to my kids. And you missed the word ‘youngest’. Children come in different ages and our *youngest* found the fuss of getting by on candles for an hour to be most illuminating (pun intended). The youngest also just happens to be young enough to need a night light and old enough to think that maybe they can do without it.
(BTW, you may also want to have word with those bastard Catholics, lighting all those candles for no good reason. Because the candles are all there is to it.)
Well, you don’t need to go into the detail of a full lifecycle assessment, obviously, and it’s not my job to explain anything to your kids. But surely there are other ways of raising awareness about the issue – or is there something magical about candles specifically, which aids the understanding?
As for the “bastard Catholics” as you put it, the candles are the least of my problems with that lot…
I find it odd that when Amnesty were using dubious statistics as a publicity stunt to raise awareness about violence against women, practically everybody was agreed that this was A Very Bad Thing which weakened AI’s credibility, yet when the WWF are encouraging people to actively waste energy to raise awareness about climate change, that’s perfectly fine because it’s just a publicity stunt.
Maybe because reduced electricity consumption vs. the suggestion of (optional) candle use on the evening wasn’t the only issue. When they swicthed off the dirty great floodlights lighting up the Parliament and Big Ben, they didn’t replace them with candles. They did, however, use electricities to broadcast that image and others to the world.
I have absolutely no problem with that aspect of Earth Hour (except perhaps that it doesn’t go far enough). My objection is specifically limited to the suggestion that people turn off their lights and burn candles instead.
If we’re going to crack this problem, we need to foster a deep understanding of the issues involved, and one of the key aspects of that is the ability to compare different forms of energy use.
Ah, I forgot about this. Mind you I was out at the time and all the lights were out.
I rather like it: it draws attention to the problem it’s concerned with in a dramatic and effective way. It might well be self-congratulatory, but so’s a demo, isn’t it?
“Climate Change Deniers”…
Soviet era labelling – indicative of the insecurity of warmist dogma.
The term “climate change” was introduced as an exit strategy, by warmists who have realised that “man made global warming” simply isn’t going to happen; “I never said that! – I said it would *change* the climate..”
‘Warmist dogma’. I like that.
I’m a Warmist. Mmmm. Makes me sound all cuddly and snuggly.
Some lovely pictures that you can only view using more wasted electricities. Shame on all of us:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/03/earth_hour_2009.html