Saw yet another blog post about Earth Hour just now, and once more was struck by just how stupid the idea is.
Earth Hour is not a good thing for the environment, I won’t say it’s not great as an awareness raising method – but frankly it’s downright stupid. In fact, this kind of unscientific approach to climate change is a large part of why we still have trouble getting governments and corps to take it seriously enough to make real efforts to fix it through things like Kyoto.
You see, the impact of switching your lights on or off is relatively minor on the climate scale, cars and factories make up a good 70% of the air pollution that we need to fix, Electrical generation stations make up about 20% more with the rest divided among various things (these statistics are probably not 100% accurate as climatologist aren’t in full agreement on the matter and besides that it’s very hard to get truly accurate values). Switching off lights en-mass will cut down that 20% figure – but the thing is, it’s going to push up the 10% figure – by much larger amount !
Right in that same post lies the reason: people are saying things like “read a book by candlelight instead”.
Candlelight ? A candle burning for an hour causes about 500% more pollution than an electric lamp. Firstly they are both made in factories – but candles usually take more energy to make (particularly lot more heat energy to shape the wax), once burning – a lightbulb does not cause any direct emissions, it draws some power from the power station which causes some but even old fashioned lightbulbs only draw a fraction of what geysers and stoves draw. Modern energy-saving bulbs use an order of magnitude less, and if you have LED lights – it’s another order of magnitude reduction (granted those are still very rare and expensive). Candles may not draw power from the station – but they burn with flame, it’s a direct non-renewable burning of a fossil fuel that is producing emissions the entire time.
Oil lamps and other flame-based lights are even worse than candles ! Gas lamps are probably worst of all (unless you can manage to get methane lamps as methane burns with extremely low emission rates).
Basically… earth hour is the environmental fashion movement trying to make a statement.. and not thinking about the actual science and doing a lot more harm than good. It’s a great thing that climate change has become a matter of fashion – few people can ever be persuaded to care about about real issues especially if there is any personal sacrifice or change involved, but most of those people care about fashion more than anything else.
The problem is – the environmental fashion group has made no effort to understand the real science behind climate change, the real problems faced – and the real solutions.
In a future post, I will talk about what some of those solutions really are. Suffice to say for now – very little of the “Green” movement’s fashionable activities and products are actually good – in fact, very often they (like earth hour) will actually make the problem worse.
And let’s get one thing very clear: saving the planet is the dumbest crusade you can go on. We don’t need to save the planet, the planet will save itself, life will survive – this planet has survived far worse than humans a million times over – life has survived tragedies that make global warming look like an old lady who slipped on a banana peel.
The real scientists – and those who listen to them – we’re not fighting climate change to save the planet, the planet will be fine – we’re fighting for something far more important: to save ourselves.
Life, and this planet will survive global warming, homo sapience probably won’t.
at least some people are making an effort to do good. if thats fashoinable then its a good fashion statement regardless. More than 2 million Sydney residents joined Earth Hour on Saturday March 31 between 7.30 and 8.30 by flicking the switch, turning appliances off stand-by and enjoying an hour of quiet darkness, according to poll results.
Residents and businesses across the city showed their support for Earth Hour resulting in an impressive 10.2% drop in energy usage across the usually glittering CBD, according to Energy Australia.
This is double the anticipated energy saving and represents a reduction of 24.86 tonnes of carbon dioxide – the equivalent of taking 48,613 cars off the road for an hour.
Jon, in my post even I say that raising awareness is a good thing, I just wish that the people doing so were actually listening to the scientists.
It’s true- we did save a lot of energy with Earth Hour – ESKOM here published figures, but saving energy is not the primary concern, reducing air pollution is.
You are measuring what we didn’t use from power stations and ignoring what we instead dumped in the air from a few billion candles and lamps.
We need to get away from non-renewable energy because we’re running out, but that has nothing to do with global warming. We ALSO need to cut down on air pollution because we are going to kill ourselves if we don’t.
There is a link between these two separate causes, and it is this: Since we need to find new energy sources anyway, we should be smart and choose cleaner ones so we can get hit two birds with one stone.
And yet… go see who marched in Durban to prevent the building of another Nuclear power station ? The SAME people who led the earth-hour marches !
Right now, Nuclear energy is the cleanest, most viable energy reserve we have. It’s not renewable, but it’s a lot more readily available than fossil fuels, it doesn’t produce any air pollution and the water-heat pollution problem from older reactors can be prevented.
Modern breeder-reactors don’t even produce much nuclear waste, and what it does produce at the end of the cycle wears out in a hundred years, not thousands like older ones (and would be completely useless for weapons manufacture).
Nuclear is our only viable way of supplying our energy needs for a long time – we’re a while away from wind and solar being able to do so, perhaps we will never be able to harness those effectively enough, but we can get rid of coal and oil generators.
Right now – electric cars would make basically no difference, everything we save on car-emissions we’d be spending back in generator emissions to power the extra load on the grid (basic laws of science – the energy need to do a certain amount of work is always the same – you can get it from somewhere else but you cannot reduce it) – so the only way to viably fight back against global warming is this: build nuclear power stations, as many as we need to shut down every coal and oil station in the world, THEN build electric cars – and use things like tax-rebates to encourage their adoption.
Now try selling THAT to the people who celebrated earth hour ?