We in the West are drowning in a cornucopia of ill-conceived special celebrations.
From National Bike to Work Day (May 19) to Global Forgiveness Day (Aug. 27) to International Peace Day (Sept. 21), there are a rash of events that the self-righteous have concocted in order to make themselves feel good, if not morally superior, to those around them.
These events are largely limited to the Western world because the rest of the globe is too busy trying to stay alive to be bothered with such claptrap.
This Saturday (8:30 p.m.-9:30 p.m. for those of you keeping score at home), the annual self-congratulatory activity known as Earth Hour will be held under the guise of “United People to Save the Planet.”
Rather than list my many objections to this bit of imbecility, I’ll let you read the words of Canadian economist Ross McKitrick, who, in 2009, was asked by a journalist for his thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour:
I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.
Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labor and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.
Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water.
Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases. Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.
The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity.
People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their refrigerator, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.
I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.
Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering, our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry and the power supply.
If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations.
No thanks. I like visiting nature but I don’t want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.
If I possessed that eloquence, I’d probably have more than half a dozen readers and wouldn’t be living in a van down by the river a much larger bank account.
No word on whether Earth Hour is just a giant charade cooked up by Big Candle to boost profits, but come Saturday evening I’ll be happily burning every old-fashioned 100-watt incandescent light bulb I can find.
(Top: One can only hope that the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the University of Kentucky Children’s Hospital, which saves hundreds of newborns each year, won’t turn off its life-saving equipment this coming Saturday night for Earth Hour.)
The Cotton Boll Conspiracy 
This is the best response to Earth Hour I’ve ever read. Thanks for sharing it!
Thank you, Sarah. It just seems so counterproductive to demonize something that has done so much good for the world over the past 100-plus years. I like the outdoors, but I have no desire to live in a world without electricity.
I could not agree with you more.
I remember washing days at my grandparents’s farm in the fifties. Electricity had not yet reached that area.
They employed thirteen single men who lived on site and who were fed and lodged there…my grandmother had two young women to help her with the work of house and dairy.
Washing days were once a month in summer..and goodness only knows how far apart in a Scottish winter. Three specialised laundry women would come – they went to every farm in the area – and the whole process would take two days, from the men bringing water to the huge tubs, the ash filtered through a tammy cloth into the water…the soaking, the washing, rinsing and the eventual ironing, all done over wood fires to heat the water and the heavy irons.
As you can imagine, the meals were mainly of cold meat on those days!
I would dearly love to shove those who celebrate Earth Hour back into the past – without much money – and see how they felt then.
And the rest of the self satisfied celebrators of this and that claptrap with them.
On the other hand I would like to see the revival of the ‘Go to work on egg’ campaign which took place in the sixties in the U.K.
It featured women dressed as chickens delivering eggs to the door in the areas targeted – a guaranteed dissuasion to over indulgence in alcohol if you opened the door to that sight at seven in the morning…
Yes, a very high percentage of the people involved in these campaigns have never spent a single day without electricity. They have no idea what it’s like to live without it. Turning off a few lights and the television for one hour on a Saturday evening is the sort of feel-good, pat-on-the-back type action that gets media attention and makes no real difference.
Nice! Brilliant and funny.
Much obliged. Thanks for taking time to read and comment.
Hahahaha, spot on!