The WWF’s fatuous Earth Hour is a marriage of cynical Green eco-propaganda with scientifically-illiterate virtue-signalling

Every year, it happens. Despite “climate change” justifiably figuring ever-lower in their major concerns reported by people in surveys around the world, every year it still happens.

The World Wildlife Fund, today a wealthy mega-corporation with slick marketing, more concerned with promoting undemocratic one-world government to prevent enterprise-capitalism and free trade moving millions from poverty into prosperity than it is with saving pandas or polar bears – the latter of which are doing just fine, thank you, despite its relentless but mendacious climate-alarmism – enjoins the world to plunge itself into darkness for an hour, to “save the planet”.

This isn’t the place to launch into a detailed exposition of the numerous manifest flaws in the theory of catastrophic global warming being attributable solely to the mere 3% of atmospheric carbon-dioxide that results from all human activity. It would make this an article of 8,000 words rather than 800. But for the purposes of this article, just hold two thoughts in your mind. First, that despite the measured atmospheric concentration of CO2 having continued to rise, global average temperatures have been flat for nearly 19 years. And second, that the Earth’s historical record shows no significant CO2-temperature correlation anyway.

But, even if you refuse to believe what logic should tell you, that you can no more “fight climate-change” that you can “fight” tomorrow morning’s sunrise: if you uncritically accept the Green orthodoxy: the point to realise about Earth Hour is that your gesture – because, make no mistake, that is what it is, not a “contribution” – will actually be futile.

Firstly, a pinprick one-hour interruption to the overwhelming majority of residential light use that occurs at night will have no emissions-reducing effects whatsoever, on anything. At night, most power stations run at the same capacity as during daytime peak demand periods, and produce electricity (and thus the same barely-measurable amount of greenhouse gas anyway), whether it is being used to create light or not. There is no way sufficiently economically- or technically-feasible to store this excess power produced at night  – which is why electricity generators sell off-peak power so cheaply to run our electric hot water systems at night, which function as virtual batteries. Hydro and gas-fired plants are responsive to fluctuating power demand: but others are not.

Secondly, in Britain, domestic household consumption accounts for only ~30% of overall energy use. Heating and hot water represent ~80% of that ~30%, while lighting accounts for a mere ~9% of it. In other words, under 2.7% of Britain’s energy consumption can be blamed on a recklessly eco-uncaring population “destroying the planet”, as the WWF would have you believe, by having lights switched on at night.

Thirdly, just consider the language used to justify a minusculely-effective measure that will achieve staggeringly little, if anything, apart from potentially more traffic accidents and crime. “Climate change is the most serious threat facing people and nature”, pontificates the WWF. You might, however, think that continued sluggish growth in the global economy, mass-migration from a Middle East mired in religious schism-induced turmoil, and the global threat from expansionist, violent-supremacist Islamist-Jihadism, are far more serious than a now 19 years-halted global average temperature rise of just ~0.8°C in 150 years as the Earth recovers from the nadir of the Little Ice Age.

Mind you, there is one place on Earth where deep-Green ideology’s eco-argument, flawed as it is, clearly resonates. As the satellite photograph shows, North Korea is the most enthusiastic observer of Earth Hour on the planet. So much so, in fact, that it’s observed every hour – every night. This is what the WWF wants us us to emulate.

If you really feel you’ll be making a contribution to saving Gaia by sitting in the dark or in candlelight for an hour this evening, repeating what, for thousands of years, people suffered out of dire necessity and lack of alternative, go ahead. But all you’ll be doing is unthinking, narcissistic virtue-signalling, telling yourself and your neighbours what a good and caring person you are, while simultaneously demonstrating both your scientific illiteracy and your gullibility to cynical Green eco-propaganda.

It’s nearly 140 years now since Thomas Edison patented the first modern light bulb. It allowed us to light our homes and our public spaces like never before. It’s a small but powerful symbol of man’s victory over what for aeons was a terrifying natural phenomenon: darkness, and its companion, the unknown. The WWF’s misguided war on light via its fatuous Flat-Earth Hour is a perfect metaphor for Green-environmentalism: it wants to return us to the Dark Ages.

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