Tag: earth hour

Still in the dark about Earth Hour?

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Yes yes, I’ve been told that Earth Hour is all about “raising awareness” about “climate change”. I’ve also commented that I really don’t think it’s necessary to raise any more awareness about something we can’t get through a single Pistorius-free day without having rammed down our collective gullet.

In addition, I may also have mentioned that Earth Hour gives slacktivists the perfect opportunity to enjoy their favourite pastime, namely thinking that they’re making a difference without actually making a difference at all. In fact, as that article on Slate pointed out, lighting an inefficient candle (which most bunny-huggers and pseudo bunny-huggers will do this evening) is actually more harmful to our precious environment than using a fat incandescent light bulb for an hour (or, by extrapolation, any given period of time). But how much more harmful?

Well, I’ve found someone who has done some rudimentary calculations to find out exactly how much:

I know candles are nice and romantic – but you’re taking paraffin wax, in the form of a candle, and burning it, very inefficiently, at a low temperature. This stuff is pure hydrocarbon – it’s a heavy alkane fraction distilled straight off crude oil. This stuff is getting so scarce that nations are prepared to go to war just to secure it, remember?

A candle flame burns at a low temperature – so it’s a thermodynamically very inefficient source of energy – and most of the energy released in a candle is wasted as heat, anyway.

Even if 80% of your electricity comes from coal and fossil fuel fired power stations, as it does in Australia, burning candles is very polluting and certainly very greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions intensive, even more so than electric lighting.

Luke Weston then spoon feeds us through his calculations, just so that there can be no confusion as to how he reaches his conclusion. I’m not going to reproduce all those calculations here, but suffice to say that the results (standardised for the amount of light produced – apples with apples and all that) are as follows:

A incandescent bulb produces 1.11g CO2 for each hour that it is burned.
A candle produces 10.69g  for each hour that it is burned.

Therefore, for every candle that is burned to replace electric lighting during Earth Hour, greenhouse gas emissions over the course of the one hour are increased by 9.6 g of carbon dioxide.
If the light output from a 40 W light bulb was to be completely replaced by candles, this will lead to the emission of an extra 295 grams of carbon dioxide per over simply using the electric lights – if the equivalent of one thousand 40 W bulbs are replaced by candles, that’s an extra 295 kilograms of CO2 emitted.

I don’t know about you, but I can feel it getting warmer already.

Thus, if you really want to “make a difference” this evening (a positive difference, that is), you’ll be far better off sitting in the dark for an hour. And, if you want to DOUBLE the your contribution to saving the planet, you could do it for two.

But then we have to remember that there’s football and rugby in Cape Town tonight which you’ll want to watch on your dirty, still not ever so energy efficient flatscreen TV, dwarfing any potential benefits of switching off your lights and (not) firing up a candle.

Fortunately, this darkness and/or watching sport will (possibly) restrict the amount of “other activities” that some people have been suggesting might be an enjoyable and romantic by-product of an environment-destroying candlelit evening. I say “fortunately” because my wife is away this evening because each baby produced from those “other activities” will add so much to your household carbon footprint that you might as well stop washing out those Marmite jars and begin weeping right now:

Take, for example, a hypothetical American woman who switches to a more fuel-efficient car, drives less, recycles, installs more efficient light bulbs, and replaces her refrigerator and windows with energy-saving models. If she had two children, the researchers found, her carbon legacy would eventually rise to nearly 40 times what she had saved by those actions.

So. Please spend your Earth Hour in the dark. No lights, no candles, certainly no TV and ABSOLUTELY NO HANKY PANKY!

And even then, please don’t pretend that you’re actually making a difference.

Slate: Earth Hour is all wrong

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Ah yes. Another annual opportunity for slacktivism approaches. If you’re all done with clicking LIKE to cure some Indian child with a facial abscess and you’ve signed that online petition against whales (or Wales), you too can switch your lights off for an hour and save the planet.

Or… er… not:

If switching off the lights for one hour per year really were beneficial, why would we not do it for the other 8,759?
Hypothetically, switching off the lights for an hour would cut CO2 emissions from power plants around the world. But, even if everyone in the entire world cut all residential lighting, and this translated entirely into CO2 reduction, it would be the equivalent of China pausing its CO2 emissions for less than four minutes.

Well worth it then? No.

As the United Kingdom’s National Grid operators have found, a small decline in electricity consumption does not translate into less energy being pumped into the grid, and therefore will not reduce emissions. Moreover, during Earth Hour, any significant drop in electricity demand will entail a reduction in CO2 emissions during the hour, but it will be offset by the surge from firing up coal or gas stations to restore electricity supplies afterward.

But if you do still decide to continue with switching the lights off, then don’t even think about lighting a candle:

[They] are still fossil fuels—and almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light bulbs. Using one candle for each switched-off bulb cancels out even the theoretical CO2 reduction; using two candles means that you emit more CO2.

That won’t bother anyone taking part though, because they will feel that they are doing their bit, making a difference. And while a little bit of me wants to correct them on that fact, it’ll only upset them. And the only thing worse than a misinformed tree-hugger is a sad tree-hugger.

But, if you are one of those people who thinks that they can absolve themselves of all their environmental misdeeds simply by clicking a switch on Saturday, perhaps you should consider a better way of reducing your impact on the planet, because what you are planning is a complete waste of time – and electricity.

Fighting ire with fire

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From here, via here.

With the G20 protests taking place in London today, Guido takes us back to previous occasions when demonstrators have bitten off more than they could chew:

WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail. What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement. “We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”

Another said: “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.” Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: “Sod off, Swampy.”

Protesters conceded that mounting the operation after lunch may not have been the best plan. “The violence was instant,” Jon Beresford, 39, an electrical engineer from Nottingham, said. They were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. “They were kicking and punching men and women indiscriminately,” a photographer said. “It was really ugly, but Greenpeace did not fight back.”

Mr Beresford said: “They followed the guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement.” Last night Greenpeace said two protesters were in hospital, one with a suspected broken jaw, the other with concussion.

Classic moments. And I can quite see where those oil traders were coming from. Since my dismissal of all things Earth Hour on here and elsewhere on the web, I have had bunnyhuggers, lefties and bunnyhugging lefties chastising me at every opportunity. Not very pleasant and not very conducive to debate on the subjects at hand. And damn annoying, if I’m honest.

If Earth Hour was so very important, then why don’t they try it every night? Or would that make them miss Desperate Housewives and “Grey’s” (as it has annoyingly become known)?
All about priorities, I guess. Like the hypocrisy of those “eco-warriors” giving their desperately ill child drugs which had been tested on animals. Or the Noordhoek residents who drive 120km round trip to work each day, but consider themselves “green”, because “they do their bit for the environment”.
Oh yes. They certainly do. Probably not in the way they imagine though.

What the whiners about Earth Hour don’t seem to realise (aside from the fact that it made almost completely no difference to South Africa’s energy consumption) is that not everyone chooses to share their point of view. I didn’t go out of my way to waste electricity for 60 minutes. That would have been unnecessarily antagonistic, expensive and equally pointless. I just sat there and watched a bit of Top Gear, while eating a spicy lamb pizza. Apathetic, you might call it. Conscientious objectionism, I might argue.

But even my expressing my viewpoint is apparently not allowed anymore and the vitriol and bile has been free-flowing from the greenies.
Well, sod them. Their continuing insistance that Earth Hour made any sort of difference (especially here) and their ongoing nastiness towards non-participants invite ridicule. If you have more to say, you’re welcome: the comments window is just below.

Bring it, Swampy.  

Dan Power wastes energy

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VOTE FOR ME IN THE 2009 SOUTH AFRICAN BLOG AWARDS!

We’ve all had it up to here [indicates height of rising sea level at about neck level] with eco-whiners whining about the eco, haven’t we? 
It’s not that I don’t recognise the need to be kinder to the environment, it’s just that I’m getting annoyed with constantly being told about it – like the utterly pointless Earth Hour this weekend. Switching off my lights on Saturday evening  won’t raise any awareness amongst my neighbours, because they’ll all be watching TV with their lights on and their curtains closed. And then when all the treehuggers switch their power back on, there’ll actually be a bigger power demand with the “spike” as appliances start up again. Possibly.
Who can forget the embarrassing fiasco of Energy Saving Day in the UK last year, when power consumption actually increased 0.1% above average. Oops.
Anyway, I utilise about 8 hours of power saving each night when I switch all my lights off and go to bed. It’s like 8 Earth Hours in one go. Brilliant.

If the upcoming Earth Hour has made the festering boil on the neck of humanity come to a oily, oozing head, then step forward Dan Power – because he’s the man to squeeze the pus out and ease the pressure with his Energy Wasting Day on April 1st.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1_O6NDTbvw]

Embarrassingly cheesy amateur British comedy at it’s best. Yes, I’m cringing too.

Of course, it’s all in a good cause: namely treehugging and eco-awareness via together.com. But what a refreshingly not in-your-face way of going about things. Because you can easily make a bit of a difference every day, without gimmicks like Earth Hour. At Chez 6000, we already institute a wide range of energy saving practices, we recycle and we only fly long-haul when we need to be somewhere far away from the place where we currently are. But I don’t go round constantly telling people about it (apart from just now) and I don’t go round forcing them to do the same.

What I do around constantly telling people about and forcing them to do is voting for this blog in the 2009 South African Blog Awards. It won’t save the planet – hell, it won’t even win me the award – but it’ll make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like a high-quality brandy on a cold winter’s day. Which we won’t be having many more of if global warming kicks in, anyway.