I didn’t do a thing. It is about as stupid as posting the color of your underwear to speak out against breast cancer or whatever the cause was a couple months ago.
Huh, I didn’t expect the vitriol as a result of the question.
Yes, we did. My wife and I (not hippies) played Sequence by candle-light. It was a nice quiet time together. The kids played with us a bit and went to bed before the hour was over.
WARNING! TOUCHY-FEELY HIPPIE CRAP FOLLOWS :rolleyes:
The kids (8 years old) had come home from school noting the importance of doing this. It led to a discussion of the difference of ‘using’ vs ‘wasting’. We typically have only the lights on that we are using anyway. We also don’t run water when we aren’t using it. This served as a punctuation to that point. We also discussed how this wasn’t going to make any big changes by doing this for an hour, but that it may make people realize that they don’t need to have all the lights on that they are not using. I also tried to explain the hours of the day when most electricity is used, but I don’t think they ‘got’ that.
My daughter thought it was going to be some sort of party time, as the teachers had wanted to note that it wasn’t just time to sit in the dark, but to interact with your family by playing games or telling stories.
Apparently this has not had the intended effect with a significant portion of the population.
It certainly didn’t save us any money…our rate is ~$0.10/kWh, which means that it costs me $0.10 to run 16 60watt bulbs for an hour. I think the candles cost more than that…
This is great, thanks for the positive response!
My sentiments exactly.
I didn’t. I never have. I try to make a minimum impact in my daily life anyway, I don’t like waste, but I also don’t bother with empty gestures. Earth Hour achieves nothing but a false sense of achievement. I think that’s potentially harmful if people think they’ve done their bit for the year and now can go on with their wasteful lives.
Here’s an interesting article from the OpEd section of ABC News Online (The Australian One) on an “Anti-Earth Hour” campaign.
The writer of the piece appears, IMHO, to be taking more or less the same tack as the OP in this thread- “Earth Hour is a great idea and anyone who says otherwise should be the subject of derision”, but the comments section makes interesting reading as nearly all the contributors there are basically taking the same line as most of the posters in this thread; ie it’s all a touchy-feely crock.
I didn’t, no.
Please read the rest of the thread. I am not of the opinion that Earth Hour is the greatest thing evah. My question actually came about because I was in charge of an Earth Hour type PR drive for the company I work for and I was interested in what the rest of the world was doing. I actually am not even convinced about anthropogenic climate change, to be frank, and am far from a ‘hippie’, as other have alluded to in this thread.
All the people saying it is stupid are fine. But the people bragging about doing the opposite are sad. They somehow can grasp the concept that this won’t accomplish anything, but they can’t comprehend that their response does nothing to stop it. The only thing it accomplishes is giving them a chance to brag about their passvive aggressive assholish behavior.
It’s the reaction of a child: Mom told me to clean my room, and I don’t want to, so I’m just going to make it dirtier.
Your attitude in this thread- “Thanks for threadshitting, guys” in response to people saying “I hate Earth Hour and feel so strongly about it that I leave my lights/air-conditioning on in protest” and then thanking someone for making a positive (ie agreeing with you) contribution does rather indicate that you’re not as neutral on the issue as you appear to be trying to make out. Just saying.
Me too. I turn as many on as I can so I can cancel the lights that were turned *off *by the feel-good leftists.
Also the fact that you have “i don’t care” and “i don’t think it’ll make a difference in any way” lumped into one answer like they are the same is kind of insulting.