Earth Hour to be watched over from space

[JackLuis]

They'll be watching you from 8:30-9:30 pm Saturday, turn out your lights!
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/earth.wiki_.jpg

Earth Hour to be watched over from space as the lights go out

The event will have a live commentary from space as landmarks from the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House switch off their lights

Earth Hour, the environmentally symbolic annual switch off of lights for one hour this Saturday night, is to extend into space this year, with the International Space Station taking part for the first time. A post-Gadaffi Libya will also be a newcomer to the event.

The Dutch astronaut André Kuipers, who this week oversaw the trickier task of receiving supplies from one of Europe’s unmanned spacecraft, will share photos of Earth and live commentary as landmarks from the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House switch off their lights. WWF, the event’s organisers, say this year will see record participation, with 5,411 cities and towns, and 147 countries taking part, up from 5,251 and 135 in 2011.

So you only have one hour to do the dirty, while the lights go out. Get started early!

 

[Safe_Bet]

They'll be watching you from 8:30-9:30 pm Saturday, turn out your lights!
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/earth.wiki_.jpg




So you only have one hour to do the dirty, while the lights go out. Get started early!

Pffffft! I'm not paying any attention to something organized by the World Wrestling Federation! It's all fake!

 

[trysail]

Earth Hour

by Ross McKitrick

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Ross_McKitrick.jpg/300px-Ross_McKitrick.jpg​

Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics, University of Guelph, Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour.

Here is my response.

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, 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 fridge, 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.

Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics
University of Guelph

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/northkoreaatnight.jpg?w=640​

 

[JackLuis]

But, but you can't get the pictures without cooperation.

If you see the difference, like in the Korea's but say, in Italy or France you will realize how dependent we are on transportable energy and why it makes no sense to cut off the Iranian supply. I doubt the Greeks would disagree.

 

[Handley_Page]

Saw nothing about it over here.

 

[wet_special]

The whole idea that turning off the lights and going back to nature is going to save the Earth is ridiculous. Then we're just waiting for a meteor to come blow us to oblivion. It may be 100 years or a million but eventually we're toast if we don't progress. We aren't saving the Earth just by sitting in the dark. So it's a false premise.

Call it the "Hour of Darkness" or the "Our Faux Movement Wants a Photo" Day, if you want to be honest.

And no candles, please. Wear shoes, wouldn't want to stub your toe.