I’m a little late getting this post up, but we can still celebrate human achievement by lighting up the night.
On March 31, some people will be sitting in the dark to express their “vote” for action on global climate change. Instead, you can join CEI and the thousands of people around the world who will be celebrating Human Achievement Hour (HAH). Leave your lights on to express your appreciation for the inventions and innovations that make today the best time to be alive and the recognition that future solutions require individual freedom not government coercion.
My boys have a few friends sleeping over. By the sound of things, they won’t be going to sleep anytime soon. So I may as well keep the house lit up nice and bright. Three cheers to human achievement!
Be sure to check out the video at Shout First, Ask Questions Later.
Via Instapundit
I think I’ll bake fifteen or twenty dozen cookies and run the clothes dryer all night. Sorta offset the greenies little brown out.
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Mmmm. Cookies.
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Cranberry oatmeal with pecan pieces.
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Now I’m thinking about pecan pie. And these kids won’t go to sleep. Maybe I’ll go eat some baked goods, with all of the lights on. Then I’ll fall asleep with the TV on.
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Earth Hour is another one of those gestures that enables you to look like you’re doing something about the environment without actually doing anything significant.
If a conservative suggested that we fight child pornography by pledging not to download any for a whole hour, everybody would know that was absurd.
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Best retort ever to “Earth Hour”. Every year, newspapers reprint “Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Clause”. the following should be reprinted as well in the lead up to this display of ignorant sanctimony…
Earth Hour: A Dissent
In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour.
Here is my response.
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.
Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics
University of Guelph
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Astonishingly ignorant piece. Your idea to waste energy as a way of celebrating is about as stupid as anything I have heard. Except perhaps your reader’s additional suggestions.
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Good grief you sheeple are so full of crap. You asholes crack me up…thinking your little gesture means anything. The only thing it means is you’re a bunch of ignorant little douchebags, parroting the screaming monkeys on Fox News and your radio dial. What a pathetic group of losers.
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