Kelvin Hartnall

Earth Hour – Irrational Simplicity!?

Earth Hour is a movement encouraging people to turn their lights off for an hour as a vote for Earth against global warming. Before I point out the simplistic and illogical nature of this campaign, I need to be clear that I do support the protection of the environment. There is enough scientific evidence to lead us to conclude that there is a risk of significant climate change and major ecological shifts. Even if we cannot be absolutely sure of the level of risk, the consequences of the risk would make any rational person see that it should be mitigated.

In New Zealand, as per the figures in the Ministry of Economic Development report, over 66% of our electricity is generated from renewable sources. The following graph taken from the MED report illustrates that this is mainly hydro, with geothermal and wind also contributing.

New Zealand Renewable Energy Sources

All of these supplies of electricity are carbon-neutral renewable sources of electricity.

The problem I have with Earth Hour is the simplistic thinking behind it. If we turn off our lights for an hour and instead burn candles, we are actually swapping from a near carbon-neutral light source to using a very inefficient fuel source that leads to climate change. Another popular concept is for people to have a BBQ on the evening of the Earth Hour. Again, by not using the electric oven and appliances which are almost carbon neutral, they are either burning natural gas, charcoal, or wood to cook their food. As people eat their BBQs by candle-light, they are actually making a larger contribution to climate-change than if they microwaved their dinner and ate under electric lighting.

I believe that the reasoning behind this movement is simplistic thinking based on a distrust of modern life. When people are troubled about the changes in the modern world and the consequences of them, it is natural and intuitive to conclude that a great leap backwards would solve our modern day problems. Actually they won’t. If we all permanently moved to using candles and open-fires we’d increase the rate of climate change and increase local pollution. What we actually need is a great-leap-forward. We need to harness renewable sources of energy such as wind-power, tidal power, and solar-power. And we need to add carbon taxes to correct the economic externality of carbon emission. That is, we need to further tax people who light candles and cook BBQs!

So in summary, I think Earth Hour is just collective feel-good simplistic thinking. Things that really would reduce carbon emissions would be a “Don’t drive your SUV day” or a “Walk to work day” or “Eat vegetarian for a day”. Any of those would reduce carbon emissions instead of increasing them as Earth Hour does.

On the flip-side, maybe Earth Hour has already been succeeded in its objective. It has encouraged me to write this blog entry and for you to read this blog entry. Therefore we have both raised our awareness about climate change and what things we should do to work towards mitigating this risk.