Is it just me, or does everyone else think that Earth Hour is silly? Here’s how Earth Hour works: you sit around all day in your house, watching your big screen TV, and then at the appointed hour you drive your car to your friend’s Earth Hour party, where for one hour you turn out the lights, and instead burn candles. This is supposed to save the earth.
Of course driving my car to the party burns fossil fuels. Burning a candle with wax made from petroleum products literally burns fossil fuels. And eating food at the party trucked in from distant parts of the world burns lots of fossil fuels. And one hour is nice, but what about the other 8,759 hours in the year? I live in Ontario, Canada, where most of our electricity is generated by hydro-electric power (from Niagara Falls) and from nuclear power, neither of which produce green house gases. Only 6% of our energy comes from coal, and that percentage continues to decline as we phase it out. So for me, shutting off the lights doesn’t really do much good for the environment; all it does is mean a little bit less water is spilled.
The point of Earth Day is make us feel like we did something. It’s like spending an hour in church on Sunday morning, and behaving badly for the rest of the week. Oh well, I spent an hour in church, I’m a good person.
I’m not a big fan of symbolic gestures. I am a big fan of real gestures.
So, if you really want to help the environment, shut off your lights all the time, give up your gas guzzling car and big screen TV, and make some real changes.
The organizers want to raise awareness, so that we will all write letters to the politicians and demand real change. Sorry, folks, but that’s the wrong approach. Politicians can’t make real change. All they can do is pass laws to limit our freedoms, and raise taxes. In the long run, that doesn’t help anyone.
If you really want to save the environment, save it. Reduce your consumption. Put all of your electronics on power bars so that you can shut them off completely when not in use. Your computer or TV in standby mode when not in use burns a lot of power. Eat locally grown foods. Learn to walk, or ride a bike. You don’t need the government to do these things. You can do them yourself.
Let me repeat: you can do them yourself. I don’t need to impose my will on others. I don’t need to encourage the government to impose my will on others. I make changes in my own life, and I hope that my example will encourage others to also make changes.
So what will I be doing during Earth Hour? I will be leading by example. I won’t be turning off all of my lights and sitting in the dark. I will be planting a plant. I will be starting some plants in pots, and putting them in the window, and then in a few weeks when it’s warm enough outside to transfer them outside, they will go into the ground. And a month or so from now I will start eating fresh lettuce, that I grew myself, that didn’t take any fossil fuels to transport to my house. And all summer long I will eat my own vegetables.
That’s real change, that really helps the environment (and saves me money), and doesn’t involve the government imposing Person A’s opinions on Person B.
Happy Earth Hour.
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