Screw "Earth Hour" - celebrate electricity!
Ross McKitrick:
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 labour and into schools depended on the same thing ....
... 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 ...
... 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. ...
... 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.
Amen!
Earth Hour is a fire hazard. See the press release from Ontario's Fire Marshall: http://noapologies.ca/daily-news/is-gaia-worship-a-fire-hazard
ReplyDeleteI'm going to fart excessively during earth hour.
ReplyDeleteIf I had to spend every penny that I owned, I would not give up my pvr, satellite radio, hot water on demand, microwave, computer or central heating. You can also throw in the remote car starter and butt warmers into the must have column. Don't much care if the icebergs melt. I am not going back to the caves. Cheers.
ReplyDeleteHeh, those comments are in line with the CBC survey results.
ReplyDeleteWe can't all live with the privileges you value. We should live like the median in the world do. If everyone in the world had the quality of life the first world has there would be no world left. I do agree it's fickle to think much can be done in an hour's time. On the contrary, we should make it our daily task to be less dependent on materialism and less forsaking of so-called menial labour for technology and desk job paradigms that aren't sustainable. Showing solidarity with a model that can be taken by the entire world is what we need to do, otherwise we're just entitled, elitist scum whose lucky geographical birthright has given them entitlement. It's pretty sad when I can't build a small, well-structured home in my town because it doesn't meet minimum size and value requirement bylaws.
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