Just as I expected, you used your participation in Earth Hour to rub it in my face about how much more environmental you are than me. The stated goal of Earth Hour (paraphrased) is to “raise awareness of climate change” yet somehow you never got around to mentioning it to me until after it was over (yes, I knew about it, but not til the day of, and not because of you). Hey here’s a suggestion, you can be even more environmental by actually learning the waste laws of this municipality so I don’t have to keep picking your compost out of the garbage and your garbage out of the recyclables.
—Your Environmentalist by Proxy
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2009.
How many people ironically watched earth hour on TV? *meekly raising hand*
I sure did. 1 hour isn’t gonna fix it folks, nor raise awareness. China and India are still pumping out greenhouse gases like there’s no tomorrow. Earth Hour is like Buy Nothing Day. It’s a way for pretentious people to feel better about themselves by taking part in a “day” to save the Earth from one thing or the other. I mean, what the hell ever happened to Earth Day? Oh, wait, that only brings awareness. But turning your electronic equipment off for an hour is gonna save the planet! Please. More than half the people who turned off their stuff probably don’t recycle/compost properly, drive their car everywhere, use hot water to wash clothing, take baths instead of showers, so on and so forth. They probably left the heat on in the middle of it too. Saving the environment is going to take more than an hour at the end of March, and a whole hell of a lot more commitment.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t NS power still produce the same amount of power regardless if people are using it or not? Is there any actual energy savings at all?
You’re wrong, BF. People use less power, the power plants are dialed down. There’s about a two second reaction time, airc.
Still, I agree with the general criticism of Earth Hour. Probably more energy was used shilling corporate participation in the event than was saved by turning the lights off.
It was a huge misdirection play, imo.
I proudly had ALL my power on.
I turned on MORE lights, ran my truck in the driveway just to burn gas for the fun of it & I had spent 3 hours of Saturday afternoon burning boxes & other paper type products in my back yard.
I hope to be able to do even more next year, when all my renovations are complete & hopefully I’ll have a couple of tires to throw in the fire for good luck 🙂
Well, after last year’s Earth hour, I switched everything to CFLs and turned my heat down 5 degrees on average, put more blankets on the bed. Then got a giant new flatscreen this week with the money I saved. 🙂 Conserving is good.
Swamp, did you catch that CBC segment on the UV light emitted from CFL’s? Apparently some people were getting sunburns from them.
With respect to the OP, I find it funny that people try to one-up each other over how “green” they are. There’s no way live on this planet without having some sort of impact. You need to find a balance that’s good for you between spending all your time researching and implementing how to be more green and going to work to pay for your green initiatives. Not everyone has the time or money to install solar panels and compost their own feces. Being judgemental about it just makes you come of as an ass. I like to tell the green pushers that if they really want to help the earth, they should just drop dead and bring their impact down to zero.
“I like to tell the green pushers that if they really want to help the earth, they should just drop dead and bring their impact down to zero.”
Miles, love that line. May I use it?
You like it? It’s yours.
I sang the long version of ‘American Pie’ five times to a candle sitting on tin foil – groovy, man.
Miles: Yep! You’d apparently have to sit right next to them for an inordinate amount of time though for it to even be remotely damaging. An eight hour workday would be about the same as a minute of direct sunlight.
I’m trying to get work to switch, there’s halogens in all the offices and it jacks the temperature up by like, 5 degrees in the first hour. I’m wearing shorts already.
Was that different from most nights for you TTFN?
Except for my nekkid candle dance – my ba-ba-booms kept extinguishing the flame so I had to do it around a houseplant with a lighter raised high. The houseplant did not survive.
“ba-ba-booms” 🙂
Swamp: I tried a couple of CFL’s but I found they burned out faster than my regular bulbs. I might try picking up a few more, but so far I’m not impressed. Also, you have the mercury issue to deal with for disposal. I’m waiting for LED’s to catch on. Some of those little guys can throw off a lot of light…imagine a whole bank of them for ceiling lights. Easy on power too.
What a hypocrite. I’m embarrassed FOR the poor schlub.
CFL’s are on the fence… Mostly because they contain mercury (thereby creating hazardous waste) and require more energy to produce than regular bulbs. LEDs are the way to go.
To dr. Fever,
your attitude is exactly what’s keeping canada from making any actual progress. The whole, “oh, what’s the point of doing one little thing? if we can’t do everything we might as well do nothing” – that’s bs and you know it. It starts by doing little things. It’s true that turning off your power for one hour equates to almost nothing. But it’s a drop in the bucket, and the more awareness is raised and the more commitment is taken, then the more bigger issues we can tackle. That’s how you generate momentum, the government isn’t going to focus time and money on climate change and sustainability, until they see that Canadians are committed in their daily lives.
To Miles from Home,
you’re incredibly wrong. It’s not about finding a balance that WORKS for you. It’s about finding out what works for the planet and the future of human life. If we don’t change our behaviours radically we won’t be able to live into the next century. There’s a plethora of research to illustrate this. It is possible to live without a negative impact, but even without that, we have to reduce it to a point where it can be successfully dealt with/lived with, or mitigated. The reason the environment is in this current state is because we have been doing what worked for us and not what worked for the planet
I don’t mean people should take the attitude of “fuck the environment”. Most Canadians care about the environment and are more than happy to make changes to their lifestyle that are good for nature. Not everyone is able to change to the same extent. Some people need to drive to work where others can walk. Some people can compost in their backyard and others don’t have backyards. To judge someone for not being “green” enough just annoys them and makes them want to give up.
So, you do what you think is enough, I’ll do what I think is enough, and as long as we all have the same pro-earth attitude, don’t judge me and my efforts.
I don’t disagree that society needs to make some real change, and awareness is a key part of that. But the other part is practical. We need to make green initiatives cheaper and convenient if you want to make it accessible to enough people to make an impact. You can’t expect the majority of people to sacrifice/invest their time and money to the environment when they have more personal issues to deal with, like getting to work on time, or streatching the grocery budget or paying the bills. But, put a green bin on their lawn and they just might use it.
Uhm, James – Fever was making the point that CFL’s are more dangerous to the environment in the long run by containing mercury…how about responsible? Warming prophet..
That’s sort of my other point Dino. There are down sides to most of the “solutions” being offered by green extremists (greenstreamists?). Like most things in life, moderation is usually a safe way to go.
A wise old man told me that once and now I swear by it. I feel like this green trend is going to wind up taking us farther backwards.
I know one man who likes the “green”. Al Gore, he’s raking in millions of green coloured paper. I will not contribute.
Miles: I haven’t had any burn out yet, but there’s been a few duds in one or two boxes.
LEDs would be awesome. Those things are blinding.
Al Gore is a raging oppurtunist.
CFLs are pieces of shit. The lighting is shitty, they don’t last as long as they are supposed to and if you break one you’re SOL because then you’ll have a nice mercury spill to contend with (and it ain’t cheap to clean a mercury spill up)…how many people know they can’t just throw them in the trash? You have to take those fuckers to a recycling depot.
All this for double the price of an incandescent. Sure they might use less energy overall, but I still prefer the lighting of my incandescent bulbs, and at least if I drop one I only have to clean up some glass, not a shitload of mercury.
I’m just going to future snipe this as useless ‘green propaganda’. Check back in 10 years.
Actually James— I’m probably a better environmentalist than you, even given my attitude. CFL’s are worse in the long run and contain hazardous materials, which make them impossible to dispose of in any normal means, except for shipping them back to China and putting them in the now infamous e-Dumps. It’s like I said, Earth Hour is designed to make pretentious people happy with their tiny little contribution. Earth Day has been around for years and all of a sudden we need an hour at the end of an energy intensive month to “raise awareness”? Fuck that. You can’t take the environment lightly. You have to make actual changes, and you have to make an actual conscious effort to make change. The 1 tonne challenge is much more effective in it’s message and it’s much better in making people change. Anyone can turn off their lights for an hour. Can you reduce your carbon output by one tonne or better? Probably not.
Down at City Hall all the lights facing Grand Parad were on and then Kelly turned them off.
I bet most of them are off every night and this was just a stunt. I shall drive by one night just to check.
I think they should have a ‘3 minute shower day’ I can hear the wailing now. How many teens spend less than 15 minutes in a shower ?
‘3 minute shower day’ would feature a live CBC broadcast with breathless updates about the amount of water and heat saved. CBC could have a special 5 minute segment with Elizabeth May preparing her shower, having her shower and then drying off.
All with candle light of course.
Steamy camera lens required.
No hairdryer allowed.
Carbon emissions. Ask a Chemist. Carbon is a trace gas in our atmosphere. there are less than 500 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere. another 500ppm would barley make a differance in the chemical composition of the atmosphere. It took the earth millions of years of having life on this planet to accumulate the 500 ppm of carbon we have in the atmosphere. including 250 years of industrialization by man. Carbon emissions is a silly idea, that really damages the enviromentalist mission. If you want to rally behind a cause, choose water protection or deforestation, those issues are actually Impacting the planet. G
For a trace gas, it has important fucntions. If the current level of CO2 and other carbon gasses in the atmosphere are important for maintaining the Earth’s tempeature, then increasing or decreasing the CO2 in the atmosphere by 2-fold or more can have disasterous effects. Even if CO2 is 500 parts per million, think about how many parts that actually adds up to in tonnes. Don’t poo-poo the impact of CO2, just because it’s not making up 30% of our atmosphere. Ask a chemist.
Rafiki: Don’t assume that because CO2 accounts for “only” 500ppm, it is somehow negligible. Life on this planet requires a fine balance of all gases in the atmosphere. The millions of years of life on this planet KEPT CO2 levels where they are, primarily because life found a balance between its production and consumption. That balance got totally fucked up the moment humans started burning things to generate energy; it turns out the best things for burning were all just stogged full of carbon. In 250 years, we’ve been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at far greater volumes than the planet can deal with – that’s the problem.
It’s also often ignored (somehow), that the earth’s oceans hold a LOT more CO2 than the atmosphere, and in liquids, gas solubility goes down as temperature rises. Well, the old temperature is a’rising…
Holy gawd, are we still beating this thread to death with a stick?! Whatever floats your boat and makes the most sense to you, take advantage of it full speed. I don’t care if you use CFL’s or conventional lightbulbs, drive a hybrid or a suburban. There’s always going to be opposition to this global warming trend and there’s no use forcing it along. Pick one thing that helps the environment and stick with it.
Well that settles that. (Dust hands off thusly)
Thanks for the closure mrman. Now off to make a difference…
Carbon is a neglible gas in the atmosphere. at less than 0.04% or 500 ppm, it has little effect on the composition of the atmosphere. I am not assuming this. its fact. Human beings are also a natuarally occuring phenonmom on earth. The amount of carbon we are emitting may be intended by nature. You enviromentalists are like religious fanactics.