The earth-hour stupidity

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.