Earth Hour

[haxhaxhax]

I didn't turn off any lights during the so-called Earth Hour 2008. There were 3 or 4 lights on at the time, each rated around 15-25W - yes, those hazardous, mercury-vapour-containing compact fluorescent bulbs. My UPS monitor logged approximately 300W usage while I was playing Call of Duty 4 online. (That’s including various network equipment - modem, switch, wifi AP - a low power file server, a 22” LCD monitor and a PC with an Nvidia 7600GT GPU.. plus a macbook charger) I didn’t replace any lights with ‘calming’ oxygen-sucking candlelight, nor did I use any phenol-producing plastic glowsticks.

I’m glad that others did, however, turn off their electrical conveniences and replaced them with alternative pollutants, if only for an hour - all in the name of raising global awareness of .. what was it exactly? Energy efficiency? Pollution reduction? The minimisation of resource depletion? Carbon Dioxide emissions reduction? Oh yes, that’s right.. ‘global warming’. And, while they did so, coal-powered baseload power plants kept on belching their millions of tons of Carbon Dioxide, soot and other air pollutants.

Here’s an idea for Earth Hour 2009: How about getting the power producers involved? Instead of just switching off your lights, which does nothing to slow the actual power generation process, why not get power companies to also switch off their power plants? Think about it: instead of then having estimated savings of:

• ~10% energy usage per city
• ~40000-60000 car-usage-hours

you’d be safe in the knowledge that you actually did help STOP Carbon Dioxide (and power) production for a while, and not just flipped a few switches and buried your head in the sand long enough to delude yourself into thinking you actually made a real impact, in terms of resource consumption.

But then it’d take a few days for those baseload plants to cycle back up to full production capacity.. that should be fun - let’s call it Earth Week, instead of Earth Hour!

Real progress in energy usage and efficiency don’t happen overnight, and they certainly don’t happen with people just ‘thinking about their energy usage for an hour’. Real progress in energy usage happens in the form of:

• More energy efficient light bulbs like those from Luxim, that convert more electricity to light, rather than heat
• More efficient power generation methods, like experimental panels that convert nuclear radiation directly to electricity
• Smart devices that switch to low power mode when not being used
• People turning off unused lights every single night, instead of one hour per year
• Designing, building and buying more energy-efficient devices in the first place

So pull your head out of the sand and look at the big picture. It’s a big, energy-hungry world out there. The only way we’re going to make it is not by going backwards to the days where electricity production didn’t exist, but forwards, where electricity is produced and used in a more efficient manner.