So there was this what-have-you tonight where cities and landmarks turned off some of their lights for a whole goddamn hour to solve global warming.
Wow, a whole hour? Maybe to promote safety I’ll stop driving drunk and playing around with a loaded pistol for an hour tonight.
A news story out of Denver said that they would turn off all “non-essential” lights downtown. Do people just not get it? There shouldn’t even be any non-essential lights on in the first place if you don’t want to be wasteful.
I’m sick of this feel good shit that lets people think they make a difference whilst actually doing jack fucking squat. It’s like the housewives discussing whether a real or fake Christmas tree is better for the environment from the living room of their 6000 square foot house.
No, dude. This totally sends a message to the, um…planet that we’re thinking about it and love it and we really really really want to help it. Totally.
Earth Hour is one the greatest ideas humanity has ever had. While it will not do anything to combat the problems of energy waste and carbon emissions, it will raise awareness; as we all know, very few people are aware of the problems of energy consumption and carbon emissions.
You’d rather the alternative and have people do nothing? I agree with you that “Earth Hour” is lame when you think about how self-righteous it can be, but at the least it’s a step in the right direction.
The local NBC affiliate’s coverage said that a number of the big buildings in Chicago should have decreased electricity usage in the future due to this event encouraging the building managers to re-evaluate their nighttime lighting situations and turning off unnecessary lights - not just for an hour, but in general.
No, it is step in the wrong direction; it is just another empty gesture. It allows people to feel like they are doing something and are part of the solution, but they are not really doing anything. It furthers the idea that are easy solutions to the coming energy crisis. Instead of a serious discussion, we get empty awareness raising.
Nobody is going to turn off their lights tomorrow any more than they did yesterday. I wish that the International Dark-Sky Association would go a bit beyond their usual message about nice dark skies for astronomy geeks (like myself) and push the energy conservation angle. The use of the kind of responsible outdoor lighting they advocate would be a more effective long-term solution than tonight’s little stunt.
on edit: That, and more people (who care nothing about astronomy geeks) might listen.
I live in a small town that has stringent laws about outdoor lighting.It is dark here at night. It took a bit of getting used to, but otherwise doesn’t bug me at all. I am well aware that it’s a lot easier to do this in a town of 3400 people than a city of, oh, 3 million.
I sort of both agree and disagree with the OP. I do think it’s a rather silly gesture, but maybe some people will figure out they don’t really need all those lights on. I just can’t get myself worked up about it (unlike the three person war protest I saw on Main Street a few days ago…yeah, people, that’s going to stop the war, three people on the street of an oddly affluent small town in Idaho – if you want to protest, I’m sure there’s more useful ways to go about it! They pissed me right off.).
Excluding the first sentence, I rather agreed with your first post in this thread. Unfortunately it seems to have been entirely sarcastic and meaningless. I believe that the whole point of “Earth Hour” was to raise awareness. If anyone took it a step further to think that environmental problems are easily solvable, I don’t see how that’s the fault of the people who organized “Earth Hour.”
To follow up on CoG88’s point, here’s Snopes’ take on this sort of thing.
The only real difference between a gas boycott and “Earth Hour” is that people aren’t likely to use more power tomorrow to make up for the power they didn’t use today, so it does slightly more than nothing. If only for that, I’ll say that if anyone wants to participate in this, more power to them (pun intended).
As for “raising awareness”, I’ll go out on a limb and submit that anyone thoughtful and self-aware enough to not only consider the message behind turning off the lights for an hour, but actually change their behavior because of it, was already aware that wasting energy is not a great idea. The rest of the participants just get to feel like they accomplished something for an hour.
Of course, I suppose that in a way, however insignificant it may ultimately be, they did. Make of it what you will.
Surely you’re joking, right? It’s hard to miss, unless you’re (paradoxically) not contributing to the problem by not having a TV, computer, electricity, books, or cars. In other words, about the only people that don’t have at least a passing awareness of the problem are the few people on Earth that don’t contribute to it.
Great idea? Sure it is. It’s almost as great as boycotting Exxon next Tuesday.
EDIT: Um, OK, you were joking. Oh well, add my opinion to yours.
Here is the really stupid thing about “Earth Hour”; you’re supposed to turn your lights off between 8p and 9p, local time. What good is that to anyone? Because it is dark outside (at most latitudes) at that hour, you can’t read or do anything around the house, et cetera, so it is not as if it is going to prompt you to repeat this stunt reguarly. (I guess you are supposed to sit in the dark for an hour and contemplate how much better things were in preIndustrial times.) Why not instead ask people to turn off their lights between, say, 8a and 5p as an illustration of how little interior lighting is typically needed during those hours, or challenge people to find a way to use no more than 20 gallons of fuel in a week per household, or some other task that serves as a real example of how individuals can reduce energy consumption.
This is an empty and idiotic gesture to allow the Today Show crowd feel as if they’re doing something important while doing virtually nothing at all. Raising awareness is worth naught if you don’t provide some actual methods to manifestly reduce energy consumption that are viable in the context of modern society. A mass effort to sit around in the dark for an hour is an exercise in pointless conformity.
They’ve got the photos labeled backwards. If you click on the floating banner in the pic, you can see the difference.
As for the event itself, it always seems like the criticisms come down to “This isn’t going to solve it all by itself, so why bother doing anything?” Which is exactly the problem that it’s trying to address.
A better idea would be “every household which makes less than $100,000 a year can deduct the cost of a first-time programmable thermostat installation off their taxes for the next year.” Or “national ‘check the air in your tires’ day”, which could result at least in some actual savings of energy.