Sunday, March 28, 2010

Earth Hour 2010: A warm and fuzzy failure

Earth Hour 2010 – that’s EH10, if you must – was last night. Earth Hour started in Sydney in 2007. The idea’s to turn off all lights for an hour from 8:30 p.m. I didn’t turn mine off: First, on a practical level, my electricity’s solar, so turning off lights hardly lowers CO2 emissions. Second, on a symbolic level, my house can’t be seen from any public road or any neighbour’s house, so no-one but me (and Sergey and Larry via Google Earth) would know if I turned off my lights or not. And third, on an ideological level, my opinion hasn’t changed since I wrote this a year ago. Meanwhile the 15th UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, i.e. (forgive me) COP15, generated massive media hype but no real progress towards changing this graph. So apart from its feel-good effect – which though warm and fuzzy is of no practical import apart from swelling the coffers of its organiser WWF – on a bottom-line basis EH09 failed abjectly. EH10 will too. For though actions (and inactions) of individuals can do much to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and thus global warming and climate change, the necessary massive changes can only occur by the unified policies of all governments world-wide. But politicians need to be popular – because those in democracies want to be re-elected, and those in totalitarian regimes want not to be overthrown. So despite EH10 the CO2 graph will continue to rise – likely more steeply. Ho hum.

1 comment:

Chris Burrows said...

So I hit the word synchronous because it was such a great word, and I find Vivienne at the writing hive, she is beautiful.
The whole emissions thing and rape and pillage of the earth and the mountains of garbage we make, and filling the ocean with plastic,is crazy. Humans fulfill their own definition of vermin, we really are a sad species; so clever, but so greedy.
Enjoy the celebrations of the Passover, as we move thru the saga, long after my mother had died I discover my great grandmother's name was Meikleberg; an awful lot of things made sense!
The comment thing is working again.