In a story about a campaign called "Earth Hour," that asks people to turn off their lights for one hour a year, the Washington Post notes that much of the talk about combatting climate change is just that -- talk.
The campaign saves hardly any energy and does little to combat climate change, the Post notes. It's all symbol, no action. If the estimated 36-million people who participated in Earth Hour had instead switched all the lights in their homes to "high-efficiency compact fluorescent bulbs, simple calculations show, it
might have saved 1,368 times as much energy, because the bulbs would
have saved energy all year."
But that's become the big problem with the climate change crusade, which the Post bluntly described as "partly moral statement and
partly fashion statement. Earth Hour, Earth Day and the Miss Earth
beauty pageant -- "saving the planet, one pageant at a time" --
generate lots of publicity, but they also tend to prompt people and
companies to choose what looks good over what works."
The counterargument comes from Leslie Aun, a PR person at the World Wildlife Fund who was in charge of running Earth Hour in the U.S,: ""You need symbols to spur action. You are not going to get people to
take action unless you get them to care about the issue. You are not
going to do that by pulling out the UN report on blah, blah, blah."
Maybe so, but a University of Vermont economist points out that, at least in the U.S., ""The biggest effect on people's behavior is price. When gas reaches $4 a gallon, everyone talks about hybrids."
---Craig Pittman
