UPDATE: It appears that North Korean participation in Earth Hour was almost total. Kim Jeong-il must now be considered one of the most Earth-friendly leaders in power (no pun intended) today. Who knew that he was so enlightened?
(BTW, I am sure that I am not the first person to note NK’s participation.)
ORIGINAL POST: Earth Hour 2.0 came to Sydney today (Reuters):
A severe power blackout brought chaos to downtown Sydney on Monday afternoon, causing peak-hour traffic jams as street signals failed and leaving workers stranded in lifts as they tried to make their way home.
Failures at four high-voltage power cables virtually paralyzed Australia’s biggest city, with the Sydney Harbor tunnel partially closed to traffic and the Sydney Opera House forced to cancel all performances for the evening, local media said.
I think this is a much more appropriate way to mark what life would be like without the human ingenuity that created our power systems than the fake, self-celebratory crappery that was Earth Hour.
As an aside, I chose to mark Human Achieve Hour last weekend by using electricity to light my home and the gas supply to my stove to warm up my kids’ dinner.
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
Sorry, I’m confused. What does a severe peak hour black out in Sydney today have to with a controlled Earth Hour on Saturday night?
Why don’t you mark “Snide and Smarmy hour” with your smug and self-righteous friends by turning on every electrical appliance in your house and individually driving gas guzzling SUV’s around the block non-stop.
You can also celebrate Human Achievement Hour with nominations for Ass of the Year.”
@1 THIS
Choon, his being an ass doesn’t justify your being an ass.
Andy, you’re being an ass.
Any fair weighing of the data shows that the present trend in human behavior is unsustainable. It’s not an insult to the brains of the people who created this system to point out that it has serious flaws and needs to be fixed.
But instead of suggesting another approach, or pointing out why one approach is flawed, you’re pretending that the problem doesn’t exist – must not exist, because the people pointing it out are hippie, liberal elites (hiss, boo!).
Turn off Rush Limbaugh for a minute. The world cares about global warming, because the vast majority of scientists – including dozens of Nobel-prize winners – agree that it’s real and it’s having increasingly severe effects on the Earth. What is your response? “Human Achievement Hour.”
I like the Marmot’s Hole because it’s funny, even when I don’t agree with it’s politics. But this post deserves to be relegated back to Townhall.com and RedState.
So even though Choon was being an ass, I think you need to take a step back, check out other points of view, and come to a similar conclusion.
Great post Andy. Keep it up.
“The greatest arrogance of all: save the planet.” George Carlin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw
“Sorry, I’m confused.”
You’re too dumb to get the logic, so Andy lubed it up with snark. Don’t let his tone distract you from the revelation of what Earth Hour would be like if it was extended to the adults in the world.
You hippies are hypocrites and can never spot the connection between what you ask for, and what it’s like to actually get it. Hopefully the anti-progress crowd can row themselves to an island somewhere, and have their own Earth Hour there all day long. Carry on.
“What does a severe peak hour black out in Sydney today have to with a controlled Earth Hour on Saturday night?”
The hippies want every hour to be stone-age in it’s existence: no electricity, just miserable suffering, er, indigenous living. Sydney’s minor inconvenience are just a hint of what the hippies want for everyone.
Andy, great job.
Painting in broad strokes, isn’t it, lupin? If we ignore the unwashed hippie masses that I’m pretty sure exist only in your mind, we see that a lot of the people advocating resource conservation are actually quite educated, and quite in favor of progress. This “Human Achievement Hour” ranks in my mind right up there with Freedom Fries in it’s stupidity. You want real human achievement? Some guy in Germany just found a way to create a couple of glasses of drinkable water per day from sludge using sunlight and a plastic bowl. Now THAT’S human achievement.
To suggest that people who are concerned with the environment are “hippies” is no less retarded than claiming all gun owners are redneck survivalist nuts. At the risk of sounding rude, it comes across as being exceptionally stupid.
I’m not sure why people feel the need to label themselves, or worse, label other people. So simplistic. The “conservative” and “progressive” labels so commonly used in Korea are good examples of how flawed and divisive this way of thinking is. Most people, I strongly suspect, occupy the sensible middle ground, not some strange extreme of left or right.
Trust me on this, unwashed hippie masses do not exist only in the mind. They unfortunately congregate in at least one location in Arizona on a yearly basis, where their stink arises to the heavens and infects those unfortunate enough to be working at a summer camp the next ranch over (me).
And by “infects” I mean they’ll hand you a water bottle out of the kindness of their hearts after you’ve been mountain biking all day but their unwashed hippyness has caused them to forget that pure mountain spring water isn’t. That means the water they give you will contain unwashed hippie bacteria that will give you explosive diarrhea and debilitating, stomach-cramping heaves for three days straight, during which you curse the names of all the hippies you’ve ever known and hope that they all die horrible, nature-induced deaths due to their own BLINDING, WILLFUL STUPIDITY.
Okay guys. Debate 101. By characterizing your opposition as ignorant hippies, you’re not actually helping your cause. All you’re doing is saying that your viewpoint is slightly smarter than that of a crowd of quasi-homeless people who got lost on the way to Burning Man (that’s Burning Man as straw man; see what I did there?). And anybody can see that while you’re real eager to dig into the hippies, you have less to say about the myriad Nobel prize winners and scientific coalitions who have taken up the environmental cause.
I welcome dissenting opinions, but try to set the bar a little higher, okay?
To the Andy-haters out there; it is even worse than you think. In our house, we turn off the lights when we leave the room and dress warmly in the winter rather than put the heat on full blast. We currently don’t have a car (SUV or otherwise) but usually use taxis or public transportation to get around. It is not because of economic necessity since we are adequately blessed in that department (we could buy a car if we wanted to and a few more Sejongs a month certainly would not hurt). We do it out of old fashioned (dare I say ideological) frugality.
But Earth Hour was not about that. I was (and I repeat) fake, self-celebratory crappery.
At least the unwashed hippies are living what they preached, even if it is unpleasant to be downwind from the result. From what I have read, most of the folks who participated in this event enjoy their cushy lives the other 8759 hours of the year. It is kind of like hearing from some college kid who spent the night in a homeless shelter and says that she knows what it is like to be homeless. She doesn’t and Earth Hour is the same kind of posing mockery but on a global scale. They are standing on the shoulders of the giants who made our modern lives possible and mocking them with their foolishness. I’d say you are getting off easy with a little snark.
During Human Achievement Hour I turned on the light so we could see. I used the gas so my kids could have warm food. The systems that made both possible are true human achievements and I and thankful for the engineers, scientists and inventors who created them and the people (political, religious and social leaders, among others) who helped build societies where those people could do their work.
Make a more efficient power grid: Great. Juice up the grid with more efficient power systems: Great. Engage in a pointless, useless, load of silliness: No thanks.
#7
If the guy in question can scale it up a few thousands times, THAT would be an achievement. As it is, it is just an interesting start.
“am” thankful
Dear WWF,
In our house, we turn off the lights when we leave the room and dress warmly in the winter rather than put the heat etc and We currently don’t have a car and usually public transportation etc.
However, I think Earth Hour is fake self-celebratory crappery and I refuse to engage in a pointless, useless, load of silliness. It is posing mockery on a global scale.
Can’t you think of a better way to raise awareness towards the ..ahem.. need to take action on climate change?
Until you find a way to raise awareness that I am agreeable toward, I will write self-idulgent and sarcastic blog entries.
Kind regards
Andy
I’m an ass too. Sorry about that.
Andy it’s not you we’re hating. It’s just the attitude toward what could be easily seen as a commendable effort in the right direction. Progress.
North Korea should be given award for longest running earth hour campaign. LoL
#13
That was almost entertaining. Give it another shot. A commendable effort would be something like spending an hour doing something to help NK refugees or something like that. Earth Hour is a joke and deserves mockery.
BTW, if there is anything that does not need more awareness, it is the various causes of the environmentalist industry. Heck, we even have Lee Myung-bak (Lee Myung-bak!) talking green this and green that.
Didn’t these symbolic events that produce a huge carbon footprint through the events’ organization get realized as stupid back in the late 80′s?
#8,
Is there anything funnier than the fact that its trendy to label oneself as an ‘anarchist’?
Earth Hour–A massive envirotard circle jerk that allows delusional people to feel good about themselves for no actual accomplishment.
#18,
Yeah, I don’t imagine that people would have been as enthusiastic if they had been asked to turn their lights off for good.
#16,
Better yet: the carbon footprint offset scam.
PS. The environment is fucked.
It’s funny; when you attack environmentalism, the resulting acrimony is similar to what you get from fundamentalist Christians.
“You can be a jerk if you want, but you’re going to hell…”
“You can be a jerk if you want, but the planet will be destroyed…”
Both, in principle, statements of faith, but both backed up by their own varieties of evidence. Interesting.
One of which is largely scientific.
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