Earth Day: A Feel Good Gimmick

Illinois saved about 1% energy, on aggregate,  during Earth Hour; I believe I read that’s somewhere near the equivalent of ~150k lbs. of carbon dioxide.  Governor Pat Quinn started E-Hour by flipping a giant, 4 foot switch.  I wonder how much it cost to build a giant 4 foot switch that helped save 1% of our power usage in Illinois.

Problem?

Earth Hour isn’t the problem, but it’s indicative of the problem: people treating environmentalism as a gimmick; as a hip, popular cause to get behind[1. Kind of like when every young person I know supported Obama, then a minuscule percentage of them went out to vote for him] when it’s “the thing to do”.  But when it’s inconvenient, and nobody’s looking, environmentalism be damned.  Nothing like a quick bottle of water to quench your thirst after a long car ride to work.

And so I’m pretty sure Earth Hour is just a bunch of garbage.  It’s a feel-good holiday where people get to talk about how good they are – and how conscientious they’re towards the environment – and then, afterward, fire up every house light and get the thermostat back to around 75.  You know, somewhere comfortable.

What we need is a real environmental revolution.  We need people making resolutions to keep their power out, their computers off… to consume less and recycle more.  We need industry, the biggest polluter (by over 2/3), to begin standardizing methods for carbon capping.  We need action.  Not a giant four foot tall switch in Chicago.

Edited 3/31 for accuracy (changed E-Day to E-Hour, per Green Goliath in comments)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.