Pie Palace

“Sitting in the dark,” is associated with poverty, losers, and psychopaths. Which is why I don’t get Earth Hour. In case you haven’t heard of it, the idea is that people should turn off their lights for one hour at 8:30 on March 27 to show that they support action on climate change. The “support action on climate change” part makes sense. I get that. I support that.

But I don’t get the “turn off their lights” part.

If we’re trying to convince Canada’s population that we should do something about climate change, we aren’t going to win any converts by telling them they have to reduce their quality of life. People associate lighting with being modern. In our society, you only sit in the dark if there’s something wrong with you. If we want to actually do something, we should try to show how easy it is to live green. We should point out that we waste a crap-load of energy on inefficiency. We should point out that our energy consumption has risen by 10% between 1990 and 2003¹, but our standard of living hasn’t changed (while our real incomes have fallen).

If I got to design a replacement for Earth Hour, it would go something like this: A bunch of my fellow hippies would gather on Parliament Hill on Saturday morning with batteries and generators. We’d build a stage, and invite a bunch of acts to come out an play. Come 8:30 we’d start the show. It would be powered by generators running on non-food sourced biomass (such as agricultural waste) and batteries charged from renewable sources. Everyone who could produce a valid bus transfer, or a piece of ID with an address within two kilometers of the event would get a free drink. Everyone who brought their own drink container would get $1 off booze ($2 if the container still had the skanky remains of their morning coffee). Anyone who drove would have to stare into Fat Cat’s unblinking eye for ten minutes.

And now for a numbers rant: the bizarre part about Earth Hour is that lighting really is the least of our problems. In 2003, Canada produced 10,477,207 terajoules (TJ) of energy from green house gas emitting sources. 15.3% of that was converted to electricity.² In 2003, we used 63,000 TJ of electricity for lighting. That’s 3.9% of our total green-house-gas emitting electricity use, or .6% of our total energy use.

1. According to public data, we consumed 7,539 kilograms of oil-equivalent fuel in 1990 and 8,278 in 2003. (back)
2. Calculated by adding together the GHG emitting sources and dividing by total: (134019+337441+1138645)/10477207. This clearly doesn’t cover non-GHG emitting energy sources such as hydro, nuclear, and renewable energy. Those sources do, indirectly, emit GHGs, of course, but that makes the calculation harder. (back)

It seems fitting that Ottawa’s new baseball team should be the Fat Cats. It sure beats the (short-lived) Ottawa Renegades.

Props to the new team for using the old Sens colours:

It’s a pity that snarling crowds at Ottawa U prevented Ann Coulter from speaking.

Conservative types are holding this up as an affront to free speech. Last night’s “John Counsel” show on CFRA had the usual suspects: various flavours of little-”c” conservatives complaining that the Man is holding them down.[1] And, on the small scale, they’re right.

But I’m not so sure about the bigger picture. Anyone who wants to find out about Ann Coulter’s ideas can do so. You can find her on TV. You can find her in the library. You can find her on Youtube and on the Fox website. One could say that there’s a Coulter surplus in the mediasphere. Assuming she’s towing the Republican/Conservative party line, there are plenty of blogs and websites pushing the same ideas.

Now I’m going to embark on some speculation. I assume that the pitchfork wielding mob protesters that shut down the talk last night were the people that Ms. Coulter allegedly bashes: Muslims, the educated, homosexuals, people who read, Jews, and political moderates. If I wanted to hear the counterpoint to Ms. Coulter’s tirades, I would have to do a lot more work, as there’s no single socially progressive media outlet on the scale of Fox news, and no think-tank with Fox’s reach.[2]

That doesn’t justify shutting down a talk. That doesn’t justify barring hundreds of people from hearing Ms. Coulter speak. But it’s worth remembering.

Image by Gage Skidmore.
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1. I stopped listening to the show when John Counsel started shouting down a caller that said “I agree, but what Ann Coulter says isn’t true.” Apparently freedom of speech is only important when it echoes your opinion.

2. You could argue that the BBC or CBC would approach the scale of Fox’s reach, but neither conglomerate pushes a single viewpoint in quite the way that Fox News does.

The problem with social media is it makes you read new things. Here’s my response to a post that bubbled up in my Buzz feed:

The premise of the post seems to be that religion alters “traits” rather than current state, and that these altered states are a good thing.

I disagree with both of these assumptions.

Did good ol’ fashioned religions cause people to “radically re-think the social order”? Not really. When religions are adopted by the state, they preserve the social order. Think of Islam or Catholicism. Universal suffrage, the (US ethnic) civil rights movement, and abolitionism were artifacts of their time that were adopted by populist religious groups.

When religions are used as tools to change the social order, are the results necessarily positive? No. Just take a look at the crusades or Iran’s Basij (volunteer religious vice squad). We can toss Afghanistan’s Taliban or any number of other self appointed moral police forces throughout history.

The West’s move away from organized religion probably has more to do with the US anti-establishment backlash of the 60s and the Christian church’s failure to keep up with current morality (viz the Catholic church’s various sexual abuse cover ups, and the spasms of hate reacting against gay marriage and the ordination of women). At the same time, less and less of our lives need a mystical explanation, and people are finding it easier to operate without the small scale mutual aide that religion once provided.

Religion isn’t falling to mysticism, established religions are creaking under the weight of an open and accepting society. As time goes on, either religion will become more personal (meaning fewer organized religions) or organized religions will adapt to our progressive social landscape. Or we’ll fall into a spasm of social conservativism and the old-skool religions will suddenly be relevant again.

PS: Is the “the Market” a religion? No, not really. Fervent belief isn’t a religion any more than believing in Santa Claus or cheering on a sports team.