Conceptually DimThe Absurdity of “Earth Hour”

On March 29, 2008, the world celebrated its second annual Earth Hour, an epic sixty minutes of energy-saving, organized to draw attention to “The Greatest Threat Our Planet Has Ever Faced” – global warming, of course. A number of cities across the globe agreed simultaneously to shut off power together for a period of one hour. The event takes place annually, and the Earth Hour website ambitiously features a timer counting down until the next big show. (340 days, 14 hours, 22 minutes and 48 seconds as of this writing.)

The first Earth Hour took place in Sydney, Australia in 2007; the event’s website claims there was a 10.2% reduction in energy use when the lights were off. This year’s festivities occurred just a few weeks ago, with participants hailing from 24 cities, including four in the United States – Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix, and San Francisco. Resulting energy expenditures of Earth Hour’s efforts against the “Great Threat” varied significantly, however, as several cities reported energy savings so impressively high that experts doubted their credibility. Perhaps equally surprising, Calgary, Canada, actually increased its power consumption by 3.6% when participating. This was because of lower temperatures, requiring Calgarians to turn up their thermostats. Energy use for important reasons? Who would have thought.

Such equivocal and nonsensical results might reasonably be expected, given the underlying issue about which Earth Hour is attempting to draw attention – the possibility that climate change is influenced by the actions of man. Climate change science is confusing, muddled, and self-contradictory: a Senate Minority Report released on December 20, 2007, made international waves (as it were) by citing hundreds of scientists who disagree with the supposed “scientific consensus.” Even those who believe that global warming is real, and the result of man-made pollutants being released into the atmosphere, disagree profoundly over its consequences, with many even arguing that moderate global warming would have beneficial economic consequences for most of the world.

Unfortunately, environmentalists, and, increasingly, the left-leaning segment of the mainstream, have been radicalized to the point where they believe global annihilation is imminent if dramatic action is not taken immediately – action which invariably consists of policy that effectively shuts down large segments of the economy through regulation or insidiously poor “cap and trade” programs. Examples of such exaggerations abound. For instance, Sir John Houghton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, asserts that global warming, is “a weapon of mass destruction.” Just recently, the World Health Organization released a report arguing that recent increases in the prevalence of malaria are due to the effects of global warming (”Malaria, Floods, Malnutrition to increase with Global Warming,” Associated Press, Apr. 8); this despite disease vectors being easily traceable to the development of new trade routes (”More Global Warming Nonsense,” Wall Street Journal, Apr. 10). Or consider the egregious, although media-uncovered differences in the past two reports released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC’s 2001 report included a graph purporting to show that the Earth today is warmer than it has been at any time in the past thousand years. This graph had to be removed from the more recent report, however, as it deliberately failed to include the “medieval warm period,” between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, during which time the Earth was significantly warmer than it is today.

Of course, it is technological advancements that will allow for the development of fuel alternatives, and other means to cut human emissions. Only an advanced and thriving economy allows for the surpluses needed for the large-scale investment in alternate-fuels research that the environmentalists (as well as those who wish to break dependence on foreign oil) demand. The benevolent intentions of Earth Hour aside, “shutting down” is the opposite of what needs to be done. Indeed, as Andrew Kurtzman argued last year (”Don’t Panic,” The Brown Spectator, V:7), “shutting down” causes the greatest harm to developing countries, whose economies are not yet stable enough to handle the price increases of “greening,” and a reduced economic output from the “first world.”

Whether by solar cycles or the actions of men, the climate of our Earth is indeed changing, and absolutely must be kept under the scrutiny of unbiased scientists. But our culture is one that awards two Oscars to the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” a culture that thrives on over-dramatic representation and fleeting sensationalism. Dire circumstances certainly may excite people, and add meaning to otherwise mundane lives, a phenomenon exemplified in areas ranging from the popularity of murder mysteries to the tragic accidents and shootings featured everyday on the news. Such efforts as Earth Hour, however, ignore (and indeed work against) what is truly the “Greatest Threat”: every 3.6 seconds someone starves to death, three-quarters of whom are children under the age of 5, and most of whom are in the poorest parts of the world. It is both telling, as well as amusingly hypocritical, that Earth Hour ended with a massive display of fireworks.