The truth about Earth Hour & other climate change shams

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

Comments

[Kudzu Fire]

You are paying higher prices for gas for three reasons

1. Congress wants you to
2. Environmentalist want you to
3. Bush's Oil buddies want you to

We have been sold out. We have enough domestic oil,coal, and natural gas to have energy independence but all the whores in Washington have sold us out.