Once a year, for one whole hour, you can join the global movement of protesting climate change by turning off your lights at the same time as everyone else in the world, then turning them back on an hour later. It's pretty groundbreaking stuff, I mean really - consider this: you will be giving up one entire hour a YEAR - that's 60 minutes folks - to be in the dark, literally...but perhaps not figuratively because smart phones aren't plugged in, right? So it's cool to tweet and facebook about what you're doing during Earth hour, right?
Yaaa. This is green thinking at its best. As a participant of Earth Hour, you can be very proud of yourself for doing your part and having a "voice." Then, as soon as the hour is up, you can go back to whatever you would normally do at that hour and all hours, on every non-Earth Hour day of the year. And you will then, officially, be an idiot.
Before I slander Earth Hour entirely, I must state for the record: I believe that, generally, global movements of awareness/protest are a good thing, as apathy is like a rampant disease whose symptoms are much like chronic fatigue syndrome crossed with frontal lobe lobotomy, and anything that shows that people are passionate about a cause restores my faith in mankind. However, "movements" such as Earth Hour fall into the category of :
"Warm Fuzzy Ideas that Probably Started With Good Intentions but Have Little Or No Noticeable or Meaningful Transformative Impact on the Cause That They are Campaigning For/against"
and also, perhaps, in the category of:
"Corporate/Government Money-saving and Scheming Opportunities, Disguised as Warm Fuzzy "Green" Ideas"
Earth Hour, while being masqueraded as a global climate change awareness movement, is really just an appeasement tactic for Western consumers who want to feel like they did their part in combatting climate change. Sure, energy was saved during that hour - but let's think about this for a second: how many of the participants in Earth Hour do you think will forego the use of light energy on days other than Earth Hour Day? Is light energy the big bad wolf of climate change acceleration anyway? Are any other concessions being made by said globally aware, green people? Furthermore, where does the money that was saved on energy costs during Earth Hour end up? Econ 101 lesson: saving money on electric bill = more spending money = cha ching cha ching of cash registers. In other words, this energy saving fuels consumerism, and consumerism fuels....wait for it, wait for it.....climate change. Way to go, Earth Hour idiots. If that's the only change you are willing to make to prevent/mitigate the big CC, then it might not be worth it.
How many earth hours compensate for thirty years of consumer excess? I could get a Prius but the carbon footprint of producing the battery would take over 10 years of saving gas to compensate. I could turn off my computer but BC hydro would just sell the excess hydropower to the US. I could shop locally but I really like bananas, and wheat, and milk, and almost everything else in the store. Oh and most importantly, I could stop buying and collecting useless junk but then I would get bored. Sadly, consumers can make a change but not without addressing it at the industrial and political levels. There is so much confusion between green and Green (tm).
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