Earth Hour is pathetic tokenism

Like a lot of environmental "direct action", Earth Hour is a pathetic waste of time and effort in terms of actual outcome (of course, the counter argument is that it's main aim is education and awareness, rather than actually achieving concrete results, but at some point good intentions have to actually start producing some tangible results). I've seen figures that about 10% of households have actually "committed" to observing Earth Hour. One can expect these households to turn off TV, lights and maybe air conditioners/heaters. I doubt that they'll turn off power at the main switch-box, so they won't reduce power consumption of fridges etc., and a large part of household power use is often off-peak heating of water which happens in the early hours, so it won't be affected. Overall, I'd guess these households will achieve a 50% reduction in power use for the Earth Hour, saving about 2.1% of their daily power use. This translates to a saving of 0.0057% of these household's annual power consumption, or around 0.00057% of all household's power use for the year! I hate to be cynical, but I somehow doubt that this will do much to slow global warming...

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007