Earth Hour: Save The Planet!

So there was David Suzuki on TV reminding me to turn all the lights out last night, although he was kind enough to tell me it was okay to leave the TV on.

I wasn't going to bother with Earth Hour. I feel the same way about flicking all the lights out for an hour as I do about wearing a poppy. Symbolic gestures like this are so often hypocritical, done for public consumption and little else.

But then I fell for the flip side: if I don't turn off all the lights, people around here will think poorly of me. I'll be branded an Earth-raping planet-killer. They'd be wrong, of course, but they'll all be so sure they're right that being wrong won't really matter.

Peer pressure. It's kind of a shock to see that I haven't completely outgrown the juvenile desire to fit in.

So all the lights went off. The Leafs-Habs game stayed on, per the aforementioned special dispensation from David Suzuki, conveniently beamed to me just prior to 8:00 p.m. As I watched that game, I kept thinking about how my television draws considerably more power than all the light bulbs in my house (all but one of them flourescent) put together. And hey, if I turn the TV off, I'll still be using three-quarters of that power unless I actually unplug it too. People don't realize that: if you go a month without turning anything on in your house, unless it's all unplugged, you'll only reduce your power consumption by 25% or so.

Halfway through Earth Hour, I went outside to survey the street. The houses on either side of me were lit up like Christmas trees, but the rest of the street was quite a bit darker than usual.
I couldn't help but notice all the street lights were still blazing merrily away, though, and mentioned that to my wife upon coming back in.
"Well, they can't sacrifice safety", she said, or something to that effect. Big-city crime is just starting to appear in this city that thinks it's a village. Not for the first time I wished I was born a few generations ago, in a time when they could have turned all the street lights off, if they had wanted to. Cars have headlights, don't they? And back then, for the most part the worst hooliganism you could expect would be the egging of the odd house.
Really, it's startling how many street lights there are. Toronto has more than 160,000. Imagine the savings if they were extinguished or even dimmed.
It'd never happen, not voluntarily, at any rate. Our society has far too much invested in turning night into day. I'm looked at strangely when I say I'm abed at 9:00 most nights; for most people the average bedtime seems to be 11:00, midnight, or even later. But hey, I'm doing my part. Our lights are out much earlier than most people's. Every night.

The Toronto Star, predictably, devoted most of its paper to Earth Hour. I have to admit the pictures were interesting. Toronto's skyline had darkened considerably. There were still many, many lights on in skyscaper offices, which I for one have never understood. It can't be security: anyone willing to scale sixty stories of masonry should just be handed whatever they came for. Surely there aren't that many people working in these offices at eight at night. So why haven't we followed Europe's lead and put motion sensors everywhere? The lights only come on if there's somebody in the room. If there isn't, why the hell would you need light?

That's only one of a whole host of pro-environment measures we can and should take. There are devices called thermocouplers that regulate the temperature of water, so you don't have to waste a gallon or so every time you're waiting for your shower water to warm up. Are they installed in the average bathroom? Of course not.
And just look at how energy-inefficient the standard kitchen is. I'll quote here from Spider Robinson's "The Crazy Years" (ISBN 1-932100-35-0):

The largest two items in the room are a heat-making machine and a heat-losing machine. They sit side by side--and yet...they are not connected in any way. Hmmm.
Let's look closer. The heat-loser is--bafflingly--designed to stand on its end, so that you MUST spill money on the floor every time you open it in access or even inspect its contents. And they put the coldest part ON TOP.
The heat-maker is complementarily designed to spill money on the ceiling. Not just the four elements on top...the central module...has a door which--inexplicably--opens FROM THE TOP, so that you cannot touch the contents during cooking, even momentarily, without wasting ALL the heat. The whole unit is utterly unprogrammable, and lacks even the simplest temperature readouts: everything is done by guess.

All that may sound trivial, but multiplied over pretty much every kitchen in the Western world, you end up with a profligate waste of energy resources. Besides, it all stems from a mindset we seem to have carried with us since the dawn of civilization: energy's infinite, earth is infinite, and all of it's ours for the taking.

Human waste would make ideal fertilizer, but we've found a better use for it: none. We flush it down the crapper, wasting gallons of potable water every time we do so. All the garbage we generate--and even with raised awareness, it's a ridiculous amount--could be incinerated, quite cleanly, yielding energy in the process. But that's horrible for the environment, don't you know. Better to bury it in landfills where it can fester for centuries.

Never mind all that: If we're really serious about greenhouse gas emissions, where are all the nuclear plants?

And please, for the love of Gaia, stop telling me I've got to save the planet. According to no less an authority than George Carlin--and when you finish reading this, you'll recognize him as a consummate authority--"The Planet's Fine". This is excerpted off the album "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics".

We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet?
I'm getting tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day, I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world save for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. They don't care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun?
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!
We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. You wanna know if the planet's all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kiluaea, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...asshole.

On that note, I'm gone. Would those still in attendance please remember to shut off the lights?