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Saturday March 29,
2008
A measly hour for Earth
Did you
notice that the Earth
Hour website won't give you "useful tools and tips" on how to save the environment
unless
you register with them? I was a bit annoyed by that until I
read the most sagacious comment at Digg
where people are being encouraged to sign up. It made me laugh
out loud:
You
do realize that you can turn off your lights, and do other things
to conserve energy or help the environment any time you want, right?
And you don't need to register with any websites; you can just go ahead
and do it.
Now there's
somebody who see the difference between "bread and circus" and
constructive action.
From Wikipedia:
"Bread
and circuses" is an ancient Roman metaphor for the immediate,
short-term ambitions of a country's population, as opposed to
sophisticated long-term goals like justice, public works or art. It
often appears in commentary that accuses people of giving up their of
civic duty and following whichever political leader offers to satisfy
their decadent desires.
I just got my
hydro bill and
there's an information flyer with it that says the daily peak hours are
mid-morning and around 6 PM. So why do we wait until 8 PM? Why don't we
turn everything off for three hours instead of one? Could it be that
people don't
want to be inconvenienced in this grand global gesture? Do they
simply
prefer to do it on a full stomach, and before the 9 PM TV movie comes
on?
The
Earth Hour fad
began last year in Australia so there are now some stats on it.
Apparently, once the novelty of sitting for an hour in the dark had
waned, the decadence resumed:
News.com:
Australians embrace Earth Hour, but not green power
The difference between one hour of candle-lit symbolism and genuine
household action is vast ... Energy retailers chief executive Cameron
O'Reilly said that despite widespread concern about the threat of
climate change, household energy use was still principally driven by
price.
If people are
worried
about price, think how much they could save if they just routinely
turned off unnecessary lights, used a toaster oven instead of their
heavy duty stove oven, and turned down the heat at night.
You don't need fancy, expensive lightbulbs to conserve on energy.
You
just need to conserve on energy. Those lightbulbs are only so
that GE
and others can rake in another billion or two. People who buy
them
will leave more of them on longer than they did the incandescent ones
because they are supposedly cheaper in the long run.
And what about all the other ways energy is wasted? What about
the
person who leaves a computer and all its peripherals on 24 hours a
day? I've never understood why that's done. The only reason I've
ever
heard is that re-booting is supposedly hard on the hard drive, but so
is running it constantly. The benefits to shutting down at night extend
to fewer Windows crashes and even to better performance of modems
because they get reset.
Another drain on electricity are TVs and stereos operated by remote
control that aren't powered down when not in use. I bought a lamp
switch for my stereo when I noticed it was humming away at night.
Want to know something ironic? Google's site is all black today,
and that
display uses extra power. If you use Mozilla Firefox
you'll see that it opens to its own Google search page without the
black gimmick.
I just heard on the radio that Parliament Hill is joining Earth
Hour.
But come Christmas they may well display again those zillions of
garishly coloured lights, and the perpetual flame will continue to
daily guzzle gas. Yes, I know these are things that warm our
hearts.
So will climate change. Our throats may also become quite dry.
I wonder how much water could be saved if people simply showered every
other day instead of every day, and flushed the toilet every other time
it's used. When I was a kid people took a bath and shampooed
their
hair only once a week and they didn't smell bad because they sponge
bathed daily, used deodorant and wore clean clothes. And they brushed
their hair to distribute the natural oils and produce a sheen instead
of using chemicals. And they didn't need so many creams and
lotions
because their skin's natural moisture wasn't continually depleted.
All those
hair and other grooming and odour masking products going down the drain
can't be good for the water supply either.
I don't know why people have become so paranoid about their own natural
body scents. Some
of those same people
revere Che Guevara, who sometimes didn't bathe for months. He
said you
could tell whose bedroll was whose by smell alone.
This form
of
self-disgust is a result of the brainwashing from TV advertisers.
Like
evangelists, first they tell you some gross thing about yourself that
may not even exist, then they tell you all the bad things that will
happen to you if you don't eradicate this horrible fault, and then they
tell you that they alone have the correct solution. You wonder if
it's
really true, but you don't want to take the chance, so
you buy the swill and after a while it seems natural.
People no longer realize that humans are self-cleaning and self-healing
with only a minimal amount of extra care. In this day and age, we
should worry more about the dangerous poisons we're dumping down the
drain and into the garbage.
Electronics disposal is a serious problem:
CTV:
Canadians still trashing TVs, batteries and meds
But to be fair, a lot of well meaning people really don't know where to
get rid of electronic stuff, and people without vehicles can't get to
the few depots that exist. People need to encourage their
municipalities to
provide disposal services. For one thing, since there are already
recycling bins in apartment buildings, what would be wrong with having
a special bin for electronics? And when the city picks up the
regular
garbage on the street, why can't they also haul away electronics to a
proper disposal depot?
The politicians won't do it unless the people make it an election issue.
I don't know what's to be done about meds getting into the water supply
- except for people to stop taking them and doctors to stop prescribing
them at the drop of a symptom on the off chance they might help -
because they're excreted in pee. If users were to do some heavy
work
and run around a lot they might be able to excrete them as sweat.
The upside
is that hypochondriacs
who ran to their doctors for symptoms that would have gone away all by
themselves will finally be able to say on their tombstones: "See I told
you I
was sick." Thanks to overuse of antibiotics, MRSA
is on the increase and "they" say it's a killer.
There's a price to pay for everything. Feel good events are a
nice
gesture but, sadly, most people don't take any really meaningful action
until it starts to affect them personally.
yayacanada
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