{Essay} The Problem With Earth Hour

1.

Earth Hour will happen today, at 8:30 pm in the dark houses and candle-lit shops of urban Malaysia. Back when the first Earth Hour launched in Sydney, in 2007, I remember arguing with a bunch of 9rules friends that Earth Hour was a good idea, if more of an awareness campaign than anything else. Things have changed, since then: over the last few days I've been bombarded by radio shoutouts and print-ads and beautiful, well-crafted video spots, all in the name of saving the earth. I now no longer support Earth Hour.

The facts are these: Earth Hour is a global campaign to turn off your lights for 60 minutes, between 8:30 and 9:30pm, in the pretense of saving the world. The remarkably snazzy Malaysian EH website frames switching off your lights as a vote for candidate A: Capt' Planet, over candidate B: Global Warming, making this more of figurative, symbolic movement, as opposed to a pragmatically useful one. But back in 2007 the original Earth Hour campaign was about turning off non-essential electronic equipment, and it required the businesses that participated to pledge cutting off 5% of emissions in the space of five years. That pledge no longer exists, and businesses and corporate sponsors, and celebrities, and radio-show hosts are now all declaring their support for a campaign that doesn't require anything particularly painful of them. And that is good, in a way, if you give only sparse thought to it, but if you do begin to examine EH, you'll find that it brings to mind certain uncomfortable, highly cynical questions about the motivations powering such overused tripes, i.e.: saving the planet; going green.

Let's indulge ourselves in a cost/benefit analysis of taking part in the Earth Hour campaign. If you're an individual, and you're participating in EH tonight, what would be the cost vs the benefit? The cost to yourself would be this: an hour of fun in total shadow, in which you can choose - like some of my friends - to make out in the dark with your significant other, or to go out for a long walk in the neighbourhood pointing and laughing at certain non-participating neighbours. The value in such an act would be that you save yourself a small amount of electricity, and you walk away with the smug knowledge that you - yes, you - chipped in to save the planet. You can now return to your daily life feeling superior over those who did not participate, and gloat.

The second cost/benefit analysis that we should do when we're talking about Earth Hour is to imagine things from the perspective of a corporation  - and here the cynicism takes a turn for the worst. Let's use Ikea as an example. In conjunction with EH, Ikea Malaysia has been offering special deals for the past two days, and also the opportunity to have a candle-lit 'special combo' dinner from 6.00 to 10.30 at night. Then you'll get Serena C and the Mix.fm crew entertaining you from 7.30 onwards, with 'many games and prizes to be won' and this'll be followed up by a performance from the KL Stompers (in the dark, perhaps?).

So what is the cost to Ikea? Ikea probably has to donate a significant amount of money to the Earth Hour cause, and it has to spend some for the candles, the Mix FM crew attendance, the KL Stompers performance, the event management and - of course - the promotion for this one-night-only affair. The value? Ikea gets sales, attracts people to the store on an otherwise normal night, receives publicity and earns goodwill by posing with an inherently 'feel-good' movement - the same way certain socialites may camwhore with notable stars to bump their own prestige and attractiveness. In the meantime, however, people hop into their petrol-burning cars to attend a darkened Ikea, eat their dinners with CO2-producing candles on the table, wait for the lights to pop back on and carry on to a central area to watch live performances by otherwise unknown celebrities. Everyone has a good night out, and people go back home to the ever-common Malaysian habit of throwing out their garbage in multiple plastic bags.

2.

The most memorable video ad for Earth Hour I've seen is one of Reshmonu and Pete Teo, and it opens up with an affable Pete speaking in Mandarin, hands graceful against the black background behind them. Resh stands rather awkwardly by Pete's side - not knowing exactly where to look - and he pretends to be solemn ... although it's pretty hard to be solemn when you sport a fantastic corn-row haircut. Then he cracks up, and the ad blacks out to the chirp of crickets and the WWF logo.

The star support for this year's Malaysian Earth Hour has been nothing short of amazing. In Youtube alone I spot Maya Karin and Yasmin Ahmad; Sheikh Mustaphar and Alex Yoong. The former is hilarious, the latter a fantastic example of male posturing and phallic comparison (honestly, a Malaysian astronaut comparing equipment speeds with a race car driver - anyone rolling their eyes yet?) What this underscores is the hype surrounding EH this year - someone has put in a lot of time, money, and effort to make sure that 2009's Earth Hour goes out with a bang.

That bang is part of an overall 'feel good' element of the Earth Hour event - something the organizers are quick to point out as a good thing. Their argument is that teens, young people and the disenfranchised Malaysian would be more interested in saving the planet if they see it as a cool thing to do. But really, is cool the best angle to use on a save the world campaign? When you're over-hyping, over-commercializing, and over-selling the coolness of an event, you tend to lose track of the underlying message: that Earth Hour isn't really about one hour of darkness - it's about day-to-day, often boring habits that will collectively result in a greener, happier planet. 

In some ways, however, you cannot blame the Earth Hour organizers - EH is but one slice of the global obsession with going green - an obsession that sometimes borders on the point of stupidity. And here lies the danger of the sudden fad: when you've got a cause that's been sold - and not taught -to a majority, there's a big risk you'll get people who follow blindly out of the cool factor, or simply because everyone around them is doing it. And then what happens is you'll get cases like the Walmart plastic bag fiasco, where the world's biggest retailer announced a switch to paper bags over plastic, and instantly entire forests got chopped down to cater for the millions of sales Walmart makes per year.

3.

In 1976, popular science writer Lowell Ponte published a book about climate change. He said of it, and I quote: "(climate change) ... has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations... If it continues, and no strong measures are taken to deal with it ... will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war."

The back cover of the book featured an endorsement from Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider, which read: The dramatic importance of climate changes to the worlds future has been dangerously underestimated by many, often because we have been lulled by modern technology into thinking we have conquered nature. But this well-written book points out in clear language that the climatic threat could be as awesome as any we might face, and that massive world-wide actions to hedge against that threat deserve immediate consideration. At a minimum, public awareness of the possibilities must commence, and Lowell Ponte's provocative work is a good place to start.

It was a good recommendation, but a regrettable one in the long run. You see, Ponte wrote the book just over 30 years ago, in the hopes of promoting further awareness on the subject. In his time even the National Academy of Sciences issued a list of recommendations, amongst them: "to establish a Climatic data analysis program, and new facilities, and studies of impact of climate on man; to develop a Climatic index monitoring program ... and to develop an International Palaeoclimatic data network." 

It was very unfortunate then, that the book was about Global Cooling.^[1] 

One question that nobody seems to bring up anymore is to ask if global warming really is as preventable as everyone says it is. From 1940 to 1980 temperatures across the globe fell, for no understandable reason at all. Global cooling became a scientific 'consensus', leading Ponte to announce that 'we will be in an Ice Age 10,000 years from now', and that '(world famine, world chaos and world war) would all come by the year 2000'.  Now if we accept that in 1976 the leading scientific authorities of the day thought an Ice Age to be imminent, then what have we to convince us that Global Warming is any more human-based than Global Cooling? What proof have we, apart from political momentum and partisan opinion, that Global Warming is preventable and not part of the Earth's natural climate cycle?

The real answer to both questions is that we don't. Take rising sea levels, for instance. It's accepted dogma that global warming causes sea levels to rise, and that sooner or later we'll all drown in a layer of salt water. And that is true - if we summon up the data, we'll see an obvious trend in sea level rise (though sea levels have been dropping the past 2 years). But take another look, this time at the bigger picture, and you'll realize that sea levels have been rising for the past 10,000 years, ever since (and this is an estimate) the end of the Ice Age. So then the right question to ask is: has human activity affected the rate of rise? And the answer to that is that no, it hasn't. According to Simon Holgate of the Proudman Oceanic Laboratory, the rate of sea rise hasn't much changed over the past few decades, given a reasonable margin of error. So the upshot of all that data is that sea levels have been rising for a very long time, and there's not much any of us can do about it - mainly because we don't understand what's going on.

It's that last bit there that the people behind events like Earth Hour want to cover up. Scientific opposition to the global warming theory has slowly been disappearing, pushed out by a loud chorus of eco-activists who insist that the scientific world is in consensus about the threats of climate change. The problem with the green movement today is that their foremost exponents are calling out anyone who even dares to oppose the conventional wisdom. This simply doesn't make for good science - particularly not if the general reaction to global warming opposition is derision and personal attack, not to mention political animosity. These 'green scientists' are underscored by more cautious voices: in 2001, for example, Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, testified to the Senate Commerce Committee about the inability of computer simulations to deliver results that resemble reality, even in the cases where good measurements were available. Almost nobody has heard of him today, and what he has said about global warming: 'there is widespread agreement [among climate scientists] ... that large computer climate models are unable to even simulate major features of past climate such as the 100 thousand year cycles of ice ages that have dominated climate for the past 700 thousand years, and the very warm climates of the Miocene [23 to 5 million years ago], Eocene [57 to 35 million years ago], and Cretaceous [146 to 65 million years ago]. Neither do they do well at accounting for shorter period and less dramatic phenomena like El Ninos, quasi-biennial oscillations, or intraseasonal oscillations - all of which are well documented in the data, and important contributors to natural variability.'

In simple terms: there simply isn't much mankind understands about the Earth's climate. We don't know why the Ice Age happened, we don't know when the next Ice Age would occur, and we certainly don't know why the Earth cooled down between 1960-1980, and later heated up after 1990. Earth Hour ignores all that, and feeds into the general public assumption that global warming is a horrible, horrible disaster we should all avert, whatever the cost.

4.

Malaysian blogger Edrei Zahari - of Kamigoroshi.net - recently wrote a brilliant piece about why he's no longer participating in 2009's Earth Hour. He highlights a few pragmatic concerns that I didn't think about before - for instance, if everyone were to light up candles, how much fossil fuels would be burned in that one hour? And also - consider this: even if one million homes were to turn off their lights from 8:30 to 9:30, the powerplants that feed electricity to their homes would still be running on peak hour cycles, generating energy that will be wasted for an hour, never stored, and never to come back. Edrei points out that most people think the generators turn off the same time people do, but in reality they can't afford to do that - running the turbines from cold start would take several hours at least, forcing critical service grids like hospitals and railways to switch to private generators - wasting money, time, and increasing the probability of error.

The bottom line here is that Earth Hour is nothing more than a hyped-up global campaign, designed to waste resources in the hopes of creating some awareness in the thousands that participate. It is well-meaning - you don't have to believe in global warming to appreciate and practice responsible consumption - but by and large it does this in a frankly unresponsible way.

The Earth Hour website tells me now that I am 4 hours and 24 minutes away from switch time. I know what I'll be doing when that counter flicks down to zero: I won't be turning off my lights. Question is, would you?

^1. Ponte's reasoning for the phenomenon sounds eerily similar: he argued that sunshine was becoming weaker, and that aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere were reflecting rays back to space and preventing them from reaching the planet's surface. I know - try not to laugh. ↩