Via Counting Cats;
Will you or won’t you turn off your lights at 8.30pm on Saturday, and why?
We invite entries of no more than 150 words. Please send to loadeddog@sunherald.com.au by 10am on Friday and put “Earth Hour” in the email subject field. Please include your full name, email address and telephone number.
(link to email fixed, sorry!)
Heh.
We’ve got about 800 horsepower between the wife’s TBSS and my G8 GT with our go fast goodies added on. Every year at this time I take ’em both out in the boonies and blast the carbon out of ’em. (For you youngsters that’s something us old timers used to do to get the carbs, valves, plugs and assorted motor innards clean.) I also leave plenty of big fat number elevens at a lot of intersections. That and the little ones leave all the lights on and enjoy being able to see when it’s dark out. We’re not cavemen right?
I think this year we’ll add smoking some meat followed by a BBQ ending with a fire in the fire pit.
Eat the big one Gaia!
This year it’s going to be hard to find more things to turn on. Have had the lights on max all winter to deal with the dark and my home network is up to 10+ machines. I have so many wall-warts in my electrical sockets that the walls look diseased. I never turn off a computer except yearly to clean the fans.
I guess I’ve got a 40 Amp electric heater to turn on as it would be nice to warm up the garage, do a load of landry and a moose stew should max out my consumption along with a few bowls of microwave popcorn. Haven’t had the TV on for a few months so might be the night to watch some Big Bang Theory DVD’s. Could let my jeep idle for the hour also but my neighbors seem to be more into celebrating human achievement hour on a daily basis than “be a NORK for an hour”.
Doubt they’ll print it but this is what I sent. Forgot to mention the propane BBQ.
Dear Editor, at the appointed hour I will have every lightbulb on and will have the lawn tractor and the summer car (86 BMW imported from England so no catalytic converter, so double-plus evil) on high idle in order to charge their batteries, circulate the fluids etc. I am also going to have the winter car running just to defy the idiocy of Earth Hour.
I appreciate the fact that mankind has created technology which converts fossil fuels into energy that can then be used to preserve food, heats or cool my home as needed, transport me at 60mph, etc.
P.S. Please inform your neo-luddite readers that parafin wax used in candles is a petroleum product, as is (coal) oil used in lanterns. Unless they have killed a sperm whale for its oil or killed a cow and rendered the fat into tallow themselves they are using fossil fuel.
Cheers,
Clarence A Ruttle, 19113 Kenyon 5th Concession Road, RR5, Alexandria, Ontario, Canada, K0C 1A0.
” I aim to misbehave ”
I sent the McKitrik article to Senator Nancy Greene Raine. I had a very nice response from her:
“Thanks for sending the quote. I will leave my lights on too!”
I wish more Conservative MPs had her cojones!
Sigh. Back to vacuum tubes.
I’m not going to turn off the lights or do anything else different from my normal routine of not wasting energy 24/7. I’m certainly not going to demonstrate that I’m a redneck asswhole by turning on a bunch of lights or making a big show of wasting energy. That’s just being disrespectful.
Last year I turned on all my lights and TVs and did my laundry while some of my lemming neighbors had their lights out. F**k ’em! I had fun telling them to get their heads out of their asses the next day when they were trying to convince me of the errors of my ways. This year I’m going to do it again. I think I might also rent a Hummer and let it idle all day in my driveway on earth day.
Hey, John, I WANT to be disrespectful!
Read Ross McKitrik’s dissent to Earth Hour. (I posted it at 3:54 p.m.)
It is going to get exactly the attention it deserves: 0.
I would suggest that liberal bloggers just go off the system for about ten years, think of the improvements to the environment. Hell, just stay off line forever.
I’m off the grid, so to me every hour is Earth hour.
I also read McKitrick column and sorry to say, this guy is out to lunch. He sees Nature as the enemy when we really are part of it.
Human achievement is a great thing but can also backfire. Just one example: for 500 years we fished the cod off Newfoundland. In the old days they used wooden barks and nets held by hand. In recent years we evolved to big motors and sonars to find the fish. We ‘achieved’ so well that today the fish is gone in that part of the world, and thousands of folks lost their livelihood.
Like it or not, our planet is all we got. We foul it, we’re goners. So much for achievement.
Earth doesn’t need saving, never did, never will. We do.
GreenNeck, you’re right – we’re part of nature. The large cities that we build are the humanoid equivalent of coral reefs. If coral can be allowed to create a microenvironment which favors it, then why not humans?
All organisms change their local environment. The only organisms that think they aren’t part of nature are watermelons and are traitors to their own species. Fortunately some sanity is returning and hopefully soon humanity can fulfill Gaia’s mission of expanding to other planets.
Loki, the big cities we created cannot live on their own. They totally depend on other humans growing food elsewhere. And that food grows thanks to mechanisms we only now begin to fully understand. Did you ever examine top-soil in a microscope? It is teeming with micro-organisms. Without them, food won’t grow.
I am a fan of science-fiction, but one thing we have learned from sending probes to other planets is how utterly inhospitable they are to human life. If you want to the be first human to go colonize Mars, be my guest – I for one prefer to breathe real air and eat real food.
GreenNeck, you’re correct that cities in isolation don’t work. The fact that cities exist means that the farmers who grow the food that cities need have a much better lifestyle than if all they did was practice subsistence agriculture. While I can’t stand the city of Vancouver, I’m glad that so many people want to live there as it allows me to have more space in the interior of BC although many of the industries where I live are involved in creating products that go to Vancouver.
As far as food goes, we can grow plants hydroponically and BC’s largest export crop is grown totally hydroponically indoors. For most crops, it’s a lot simpler to grow them outdoors and that means that farmers need to maintain the soil. My own garden is totally “organic” as I like playing around with complex artificial ecosystems and the last aphid infestation I had was easily taken care of with a few applications of ladybugs. Now that the ladybug pheromones seem to have permeated my garden, they show up on their own every year.
Colonizing the planets is something I’d like to live to see and, regardless of how inhospitable the environment might seem, human ingenuity will provide solutions. Mars is actually quite a hospitable environment in terms of availability of water and CO2 in comparison to the moon. Really all it takes is plentiful energy, technology and human ingenuity to make things happen. Because of the fundamental role of electricity in making human civilization as we know it today happen, I’m participating fully in Human Achievement Hour. Just because I happen to be a techie doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy nature and technologic progress has resulted in far less human impact on non-human ecosystems than the old ways of doing things.
GreenNeck, you say you’ve read the McKitrik article: you’re either pretending or you have a language processing problem. Not once did he suggest that we use man’s ingenuity to recklessly exploit nature. However, as humans have free will, any technology can be used to both good and not so good ends. McKitrik was talking the former.
At the end of your note, you then altogether contradict your thesis by writing, “Earth doesn’t need saving, never did, never will. We do.” Well GreenNeck, that was exactly McKitrik’s point.