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Personal Reflections

“Earth” Hour?

I think I’d say I have to agree with this:

The amount of time, energy, and verbiage being spent on making people “aware” of the energy-climate problem, and asking people to make symbolic gestures to call attention to it, is out of all proportion to the time, energy, and effort going into designing a systemic solution. We’ve had too many Live Earth concerts and Barneys “Have a Green Holiday” Christmas catalogs and too few focused lobbying efforts to enact transformational green legislation. If the money and mobilization effort spent on Live Earth had gone into lobbying the U.S. Congress for more generous and longer-term production and investment tax credits for renewable energy, and for other green legislation, the impact would have been vastly more meaningful.

Taken from here. As Sir Eric Theodore Cartman said (and which I keep repeating), “Hippies. They wanna save the Earth, but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad.” Caring about wasteful energy expenditure is fine, but think about it every goddamn day and act on it, instead of acting like a sanctimonious holier-than-thou ass and trying to get people to switch off lights for one hour on one day in a year. Use CFLs, use energy efficient devices, turn off devices in standby (they can suck up a surprising amount of energy in standby too), etc. Just be a nice person, OK?

14 replies on ““Earth” Hour?”

You have missed the point completely. I mean these things are there to make people aware if they are ignorant, make them recall if they forget. I find your opinion very cynical here.

That’s the intention but the message gets lost. What happens is that people do switch of lights for one hour, see that ‘a significant impact was made’ in the newspapers and forget about it for another year.

I agree with ankur here. This hour is supposed to be a ‘symbol’. Symbol of what? The fact that we know all the crap thats happening yet will conserve for only one hour a year?
How much sense does that make?

Yaa i agree with you ankur.. But i feel that earth hour is a way good to create awareness among people.. First u need to inform people from every walks of life about the problem thats there then comes the part of giving solutions to this problem by use of CFL’s etc…

Best of Luck fro your entrances Ankur. May you get through this time. Boards got over on 30th so back on your blog.

Thanks. Although I’m not planning to give many entrances this time and mostly waiting for US college admission results.

Switch off light to do what? Save the earth?

WAIT! The earth can be destroyed?! By us? A planet that has survived for nearly 5 billion years and whose atmosphere at one point comprised of 40% carbon dioxide (to put things in perspective, it comprises of 0.0383% right now as I type). Jesus!

And I wonder what “good” they are doing by hosting Live Earth concerts? By getting millions to switch on their televisions, and an equal number to take their cars and drive to the concert; using all kinds of hi-tech power hungry electronic devices (read: lighting, sound equipments) during their shows. And lots more, you know where I’m getting at.

Load of crap.

Ankur, the point is, the concept of Earth Hour is basically to create awareness. This time Delhi alone saved power equal to 600 MW during Earth Hour (Thats quite a lot, and can give power to loads of villages!). I think even though there is a lot of hullabaloo around this, it actually worth it!

The problem is that an event like this or a Live Earth concert does spur on a lot of people at that time, but they get so drunk over their success (literally and figuratively) that they forget to do it all the time. And Ramit is right. Humans cannot destroy the Earth. Life will live on, even if we succeed in killing ourselves.

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