Earth Hour 2: "Reduce Consumption of Power" -- WWF

Electricity gives us extra freedom. We can work and have meetings further, or play with our kids, or party with friends, or watch tv/movies/sports competition even until evening. We can build, work and live in high rise buildings and go up and down anytime, 24/7, thereby saving space for roads, playground, farms, urban forest, and so on.

Now there are many groups and people who have demonized our high use of energy and electricity. A few of them have attained high profile global status to peddle their lunatic view that "more electricity = more global warming and climate change." Thus, to reduce the evils of "man-made warming", we should cut our electricity usage. How? Via high energy taxes, high energy prices by forcing us to buy expensive and immature renewable power sources, high environmental regulatory fees.

Some groups go beyond that. After successfully lobbying and supporting many governments on those rent-seeking behaviors above, they go extra by telling us that we should shut down our lights for one hour then reflect, feel guilty how we have "damaged and ruined our planet." Thus, the annual "Earth Hour" campaign by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

These guys are saying that we should use less electricity as much as possible. Perhaps like many countries in Africa. See this satellite picture at night, Africa in the south and Middle East Asia and Europe in the north.

The head of WWF Philippines Climate Unit, Atty. Gia Ibay, put it explicitly: "...the true spirit of the event into our lives – which is to reduce our consumption of power, water and other critical resources." See Earth Hour 2011.

Aside from continental Africa, here's another good model for the WWF and other climate alarmists -- North Korea. In this satellite picture taken in 2003, South Korea is the one with lots of lights, Seoul being the brightest.

The people in N. Korea shut off their lights not only one hour per year. They do it several hours per night, 365 nights a year. See also Earth Hour success in North Korea

For additional arguments why the Earth Hour is a lunatic idea, here are my earlier articles,

After Earth hour, stop breathing for an hour

Human Achievement hour

I am also reposting below a good article by Dr. McKitrrick from his blog.

Earth Hour: A Dissent

by Ross McKitrick

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