Earth Hour?

If I hadn't seen the odd reference I wouldn't have remembered that this event was meant to be today.  In the UK neither TV, nor the rest of the mainstream media have paid it any attention.

Perhaps in an age of economic stagnation, most people are fed up with smug middle class types telling them how good it would be if they used less electricity and cared more about environmental causes, and perhaps they are also tired of being told about how much harm they are causing, when the same types don't bother telling people of countries with far greater per capita contributions to emissions to do the same.

The environment matters because we breathe, eat, drink and live in it.  Yet without harnessing it, using the resources around us and applying reason to it, we would not survive.  The harnessing of energy and generation of forms of energy that only a few generations ago were mostly only visible in electrical storms, has resulted in a monumental improvement in the lives of billions.

That's something worth celebrating.  Let the people worshipping the dark do so, but I'm more concerned about the millions who don't yet have the opportunity to brighten their darkness with technology we take for granted because of the philosophy of those who don't believe people own their lives, that property rights should be defended or that science, reason and individual creativity should prevail over superstition.

Earth Hour is contrary to that, it proclaims that the answer to concerns about pollution is to abandon technology and the advantages that modernity has brought us.  That's wrong.  The answer is to embrace it, to embrace reason, to embrace the creativity of the human individual and to create property rights for that which people value (and hundreds of millions of people do value protected natural environments).