fantasticmio.com

Imagine you’re a hockey fan. You go to watch a game live, and your favourite team is playing. At a critical point in the game, the star player, the one whose name even non-hockey fans know, shoots and scores on his own net.

A handful of fans are upset, naturally, but beyond all logic, most of the fans are cheering!

After the game, the star player is interviewed, and they ask what he was thinking. He says that he scored the goal on his own net as a symbol, an example of how to shoot a puck. He wasn’t trying to get a point for his team, he was just raising awareness about goal scoring.

Fans embrace this. Road hockey games everywhere are littered with goals scored on a player’s own net. Peewee hockey games are never the same again.

A few years later, people start wondering why we keep losing hockey games.

This is how I feel about Earth Hour. (I know what you’re thinking now: “huh?” Here, look at a progress picture:

I think it might be a blanket).

When I first heard about Earth Hour, something about it made me frown. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, and it wasn’t until after last years’ event that I started getting the picture. Two stories:

After spending a week trashing the idea of Earth Hour with my friends I went over for the weekly party (totally unplanned in this post, but it was actually to watch hockey). The party-goers had spent the day painting my friend’s apartment, so very few people were expected to attend that night. I showed up, about halfway through Earth Hour. I let myself into the apartment to find myself standing in total darkness. I couldn’t see at all, and since the walls were wet with paint, I couldn’t grope around for a light switch. I stood there, calling out to my friends, hoping one would hear me and find me in the dark.

Meanwhile, at another friend’s house, he needed to go to the bathroom during Earth Hour, but he couldn’t see the toilet in the dark, so he just held it until the event was over.

Both stories show how an important part of Earth Hour was missed in both cases: the idea was to turn off unnecessary lights. A lamp on for arriving guest so they didn’t ruin the paint job was necessary. The light on in the bathroom was necessary. Both groups failed to use them.

How does this relate to the hockey story, though? I see the WWF (who is behind the Earth Hour idea) as the star player. Even people who aren’t terribly active in environmental causes have heard of them. They come up with this idea to raise awareness of global warming.

But look at the Earth Hour website. While your lights were out, they wanted you to take pictures or video, using a camera that presumably runs on batteries. How good are batteries for the environment? They want you to blog live or Twitter. That suggests that you should be on your computer. How much energy does your computer use while it’s on? Even if you use a laptop, you have to plug it in sometime.

The heart of the matter is the lights, though. The idea is to turn off your lights. What do people use for light when they don’t use light bulbs? Flashlights and candles. Flashlights have that problem that they use batteries, but candles… something always bothered me about the candles.

What is the carbon footprint of burning a candle? I did a search, and the short answer is: it depends on what kind of candle, what kind of light bulb, and what kind of power plants you have. Considering all of that, a candle is either a bit worse or a lot worse than using a compact fluorescent lamp (AKA: curly light bulbs).

So, in an effort to raise awareness about energy usage, the WWF, using Earth Hour, has managed to promote an event where people all over the planet increase their carbon footprint for an hour, and they feel pretty fantastic about it, because the news tells them that the demand for electricity went down by a small percentage.

What they mentioned last year, that I haven’t heard this year, is that in Toronto, the first power plants to get shut down in a case like this is WIND. It takes a lot of effort and time to scale back production on a coal plant, and time and effort to bring it back up, so if demand were to drop significantly during Earth Hour, it would be the cleaner sources of energy that we lose. What good is that?

I’m a big fan of saving and protecting the environment. I don’t need to participate in Earth Hour because I don’t have any unnecessary lights on, as a general rule. I use CFL’s in every situation in my home where they are possible to use. I actively try to reduce my consumption of goods. I’m quite enthusiastic about reusing the items I have. I recycle (though, that’s a whole other rant that comes down to: hopefully, if we keep it up, they’ll be able to do it properly one day). I take public transit. I turn the water off while I brush my teeth. And on it goes.

The place where the hockey analogy falls apart is that we don’t all die when the team keeps losing. (That sound you hear is Torontonians everywhere giving a sigh of relief!)

In the end, what is my real problem with Earth Hour? These people are on my side of this argument and they’re doing something that hurts our cause.

After Earth Hour we have people who thought it was dumb and didn’t participate. No change. We have people who turned their lights off and used candles. Bigger carbon footprint. We have people who participated and thought that reducing their power use for an hour would make a significant dent in the problem of climate change. They’re wrong. We have people who participated and came away with the idea that “saving the environment” is inconvenient (stubbed toes, etc). They’re wrong. And finally, we have people who think that this sort of stunt will raise awareness. They’re wrong.

How many people do you think there are in the world who haven’t heard of climate change? Or global warming? Or at the very least, that CFL’s will save you money on your hydro bill?

It’s my opinion that we’d be better served if we had more people actively involved in getting businesses to be smarter with their energy usage (which is where most of the good feelings come from for Earth Hour: office lights turned off and not replaced with any other source of light).

We’re on the right track with getting people to switch to CFL’s. We need more ideas like this one. Other simple ideas that people could use if only they knew about them and had easy access to them.

We’re almost on the right track with reducing the use of plastic bags. Paying for grocery bags isn’t the answer, I don’t think. Not the full answer, anyway. Most people use grocery bags as small garbage bags, or to hold cat litter, or dog poo. Buying a plastic bag to use for these purposes kind of misses the point. What we need is a viable alternative to plastic bags for dealing with our garbage. Only then will people stop using them as much.

I think (and hope!) that’s the end of my rant. I apologize to those who come here for the crafts. I know there weren’t a lot in this post, but I just had to get this off my chest.

Ok, maybe a couple more pictures. This is another project I’m working on right now. It’s destined to be a birthday present in the near future:

And this is the yarn I’m using for that green/blue project mentioned earlier:

It was quite a deal! I got 8. What?