Sceptical about Earth Hour

Whilst I applaud the efforts to create awareness of our earth and how the resources we are using up everyday can damage it,I cannot help being sceptical about the upcoming Earth Hour on 28 March 2009.

The idea behind Earth Hour is to switch off your lights for an hour at 8.30pm if you support the cause. However, where does that leave everyone?

• At 8.30pm they turn off the lights in the house and head to the malls which are fully air conditioned and brightly lighted. After all, ever since that tragic incident in the car park of a shopping mall, all car parks are now kept brightly lit. You can’t turn off or dim the lights there.
• At 8.30pm they turn off the lights and head off for dinner at a restaurant offering a “set dinner by candlelight for a special promotional price” due to Earth Hour. Commercialism rears its ugly head.

The intention is to bring to the notice of the world leaders the need to address global warming and the future of our planet. But will the world leaders or even the leaders of this country care? Will the UMNO General Assembly still be ongoing then? Will they take a pause in proceedings and turn off the lights and debate in darkness? I think not.

I would rather awareness be created on a daily basis not on one specific day with what is merely a symbolic turning off of the lights which in my view does not create any awareness except for people to say “Alamak! Nationwide blackout again ah?!” or “Did you pay the TNB bill?”

We are now people influenced by trends and gimmicks. Create a day and call it Earth Day and people start to care and start to think about turning off their lights because they want to follow the crowd. Then after the hour is up, they turn the lights back on, and crank up the air-conditioner and get on their computers to blog about how they observed Earth Hour.

I expect electricity usage to SURGE after 9.30pm on 28 March 2009 because everyone wants to scrabble to tell the world how environmentally conscious they were to observe the 1 hour of darkness (maybe in the comfort of an air conditioned room or at a brightly lit mall).

If you really care about the earth, practice it every day.

• Turn off the lights when you don’t need it.
• Keep air-conditioning down to a comfortable temperate not at freezing point.
• Turn off electrical appliances you don’t need.
• Cut down the use of electricity from unimportant appliances and gadgets.
• Find greener options.
• Use recyclable bags
• Stop using plastic (impossible in this day and age!)
• Stop buying products with unnecessary extra packaging (again impossible)
• Stop wasting paper
• Stop searching out the softest toilet paper – it uses up trees
• ETC

There is so much you can do on a daily basis – not just for 1 hour of darkness on 28 March 2009.

And I highly recommend reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Its a good read and it makes you think.

The earth and universe will stay – it has its own ways of protecting itself. But we humans may not – not if we become extinct for which our time is nearly up.

So if you are asking, I am NOT observing Earth Hour. I might not be at home so the lights won’t even be on but I will not partake of a gimmick.

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