Earth Hour without Candles

This evening is an annual one hour event called Earth Hour. People around the world will turn off their lights and maybe even avoid other uses of electricity to show solidarity in an effort to curb anthropogenic global warming.

I am convinced that anthropogenic causes to global climate change are significant. And I think this is a problem that we, humanity, should work hard to address. My full time job is playing one roll in addressing this from the industrial emitters side. I think the personal choice, or consumer side of the equation is very, very important too though.

I have to say I have mixed feelings about earth hour though. On one hand it raises awareness, starts discussions and brings communities together in the name of a critical issue. This is great. It also pisses some people off and they will deliberately try to sabotage the event by maximizing their own environmental impact. A quick browse of any newspaper or blog site this week probably gave you both perspectives. All in all, there is probably a pretty big net gain in awareness of the issue and willingness to make personal lifestyle changes to reduce environmental footprint because of Earth hour.

The downside in my mind is the practicality of some of the actions encouraged in the name of Earth Hour. So my action today is to CELEBRATE EARTH HOUR as a great way of bringing people together in an effort to address one of the defining challenges of our century, and to avoid Lighting Candles. Candles are pretty much bottom of the barrel when it comes to the amount of energy required to produce light.

The amount of energy in a candle that actually turns into visible light when they are burnt is about 0.04% of the total energy. True, we are willing to accept a lot less light when it is coming from candles but still, that is crazy. I once had an engineering professor whose biggest example of human achievement was our ability to produce light. We have increased the amount of light per unit energy and per unit human effort by many orders of magnitude in the last millennium. So I will not light a candle. When we burn candles all of that wax turns into airborne things, CO2 being the best case scenario. I am sorry to be a bit of a party pooper (last year I made my in laws sit in the dark for an hour at an anniversary party) but if earth hour is worth observing then it is worth not increasing our footprint for.

I also won't drive or bus to our earth hour party and will try to minimize the amount of energy in the food I contribute. Happy Earth hour :)