Earth Hour -- did you turn out your lights?
I wrote over the weekend about Google going dark for Earth Hour. We also featured a letter to the editor in Saturday's paper from Adam Nitido, a 15-year-old:
"On March 31, 2007, the city of Sydney, Australia, turned off its lights -- 2.2 million Sydney citizens and 2,100 businesses -- for one hour. The greenhouse reduction was equivalent to taking 48,616 cars off the road for one hour."
By the way, me, my mom and daughter did take part that night, turning off the lights and having our dinner by candlelight. Last night, Katie, who is almost 5, was asking if we could do that "lights out" thing again.
Here's what an article in the Boston Globe had to say:
"World landmarks from Sydney's Opera House to San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge went dark last night as cities around the globe turned off their lights for a campaign to raise awareness of climate change. Up to 30 million people switched off their lights for 60 minutes by the time "Earth Hour" - which started in Fiji and New Zealand - completed its cycle westward, organizers said."
(Associated Press photo: The lights on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge are turned off.)
Comments
"Feel-goodism!" Nothing more. Isn’t it amazing how we’ve slipped from real world solutions to self-indulgent, meaningless, guilt-free, symbolic actions that mean absolutely nothing! It’s all pure hype! It’s a cop-out!
A real world solution, for instance, would be starting to solve the energy crisis by allowing more drilling in Alaska, offshore, (really, truly) seeking alternative energy sources. Feel-goodism (and pandering to Ozone Al and the Branch Algorians) has kept us from building refineries in the US for about 30 years. But, we’ve sure made the wacko environmentalists feel good! The results of their feel-goodism is felt at the gas station.
Somehow, I’m just not believing that the feel-gooders turned their lights off during "March Madness."
Feel-goodism says, provide water for the Delta Smelt, but not farmers. They just want to save the "cute little fishies.." The feel-gooders don’t seem to be concerned about the resulting rising food costs. The only truly "endangered species" are farmers.
We do the same thing locally. It’s easier to ban the homeless from city street medians ("outta sight, outta mind") than to offer tough and inconvenient real world solutions that deal with addictions, mental illness, etc. Feel-goodism, says, that it’s easier to give the perception of helping for public consumption, than to actually deal with the problem.
Feel-goodism is only an emotional reward. If feel-gooders actually, ever helped anyone, it’s only incidental to their main goal of feeling good.
Posted by: T C Morgan | April 1, 2008 8:08 AM
Shutting things off during March Madness would be easy. If we just did it weekly and spent time with our families it could be so positive in more ways than one.
Posted by: Jackie Krage | April 1, 2008 3:52 PM