Earth Hour
“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.
- According to public data, we consumed 7,539 kilograms of oil-equivalent fuel in 1990 and 8,278 in 2003. (back)
- 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)




The first five chapters cover Obama from age 0-18ish, and the family history of his mom’s side of the family. Now, I’d expect that to be boring, but it comes across like some kind of epic documentary about the USA from the Depression to the 80s. Not just any epic, a good epic, that hits all the right notes (American Gothic in the Depression, whites experiencing second-hand racism for befriending blacks in Texas, the idyllic land of Hawaii, the hopefulness of the 60s), and has a pretty impressive cast of characters.
Muntadar al-Zaidi threw his shoes at George Bush, yelling “
This year has been a bit of a roller coaster for the leader of Canada’s least disliked party. Breaking his own law and calling an election early,