What happened to Earth Hour?

A few years ago, when I was chairing a Commonwealth body, I received a notice from the Secretary to the effect that all Commonwealth buildings would be dark for ‘Earth Hour’ on the coming Saturday. I chanced to talk to the CEO about it a little while later and asked if it applied to us. ‘Yes, indeed!’ he replied. ‘If you want to work here on Saturday, choose a time before or after. The building will be darkened.’ This was at the time of the first Rudd Government.

It seemed odd to me. ‘Earth Hour’ was not a government initiative, but one generated by enthusiasts in Australia and more or less taken over by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Why was the Commonwealth Government dutifully observing an event that was almost religious in its staging and imagery? Our CEO,  a man wise beyond his years, shrugged, and got on with more important work. There was a great fuss made about the ‘success’ of the event because both Parliament and the great offices went dark at 8.00 pm and television cameras showed the moment.

Over the past few years, my term having expired,  I have lost interest in this little ritual, and was not inCanberra when Earth Hour came round again this year. I asked friends, most of whom were not aware of it. So I went to the Earth Hour website for news. There wasn’t much, and indeed nothing to suggest that anything of any consequence had happened anywhere in our country. I kept searching, and found something on another blog site. Apparently the Australian Tax Office (ATO) advised its employees that it would, for the ninth year running, be showing its commitment to the environment by supporting Earth Hour. Employees were asked to switch off, turn off, etc. A local resident sent this photo of the ATO’s building during Earth Hour.

I could add my thoughts on this piece of empty ritual, but someone else has done it better.  Ross McKitrick is a Canadian professor of economics who has written some great stuff about ‘climate change’, both on his own and in collaboration with the mathematics whiz Steven McIntyre, of Climate Audit (see my blogroll). This is what he wrote six years ago about Earth Hour’, at the height of the global warming hysteria.

I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.

Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water. Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases. Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.

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.

I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.

Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering, our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry and the power supply. If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations. No thanks. I like visiting nature but I don’t want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.

That, in my opinion, is a brilliant piece of writing, the frustration and anger kept under — just. The sentence I took as my take-home message is this one: [Earth Hour]  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.

I found other suggestions that, worldwide, Earth Hour is on the wane, and that people generally are ignoring the WWF message. I hope so. There are simply more sensible things to do in serving the ’cause’ of the environment.