For his own celebration of Earth Hour, David Menzies, a regular on the Charles Adler radio talk show, said he would assemble the brightest collection of movie lights he could gather and turn on every light in his house. He said he wanted to create a symbolic “middle finger” to the green movement.
As symbols go, it was no less effective than the global Earth Hour message, and likewise no less hollow.
In Red Deer, power use dropped by a statistically measurable 4.6 per cent for that single hour on Saturday. The energy not consumed would have been enough to power 30 houses for a month.
Now, did anyone die in Red Deer as a result of turning out unnecessary lights for an hour? Stub their toe in the dark? Did anyone even get a headache?
But if darkening rooms you’re not using is such a simple thing to do, why did they all light up again on Sunday?
Measuring greenhouse gases not created as a result of Earth Hour is likewise a hollow gesture, if we all go straight back to business as usual.
Menzies accomplished little more than a bump in his power bill. The Earth Hour participants won’t even be able to measure the drop in their own consumption.
As is especially true in Alberta, turning out a few light bulbs has very little to do with reducing greenhouse gases. But it has a tremendous amount to do with the needless and destructive buildup of power generation and transmission capacity in this province.
If 30 houses can be serviced for a month by simply turning off the lights in empty rooms of about 40 per cent of Red Deer’s houses, just for one little hour, that only shows the vast capacity we have for real conservation available to us. Conservation, it must be noted, that almost no Albertan is willing to undertake on an ongoing basis.
As of this writing, there are three power line proposals working their way through an approval process that is so predetermined that our government passed a special law to remove the property rights of anyone trying to stop them.
The overwhelming force behind this has always been stated to be the growing demand for electricity within Alberta, although some people point to opportunities the province sees to export power to the U.S. They get the power, Albertans get the loss of property rights, disruption to farming operations, the multibillion-dollar construction bills — and the pollution from coal-fired power plants. The private power generators get the profits.
But this demand that authorities point to is as hollow as an Earth Hour gesture.
Earth Hour proves to us each year how easy it is to dramatically reduce power demand through simple acts of conservation — if we all participate, and if we stick with the program.
Burning candles during Earth Hour is a negative gesture — you create more pollution with a candle than is saved by switching off the lights. Unless, of course, if it is done to remember the 1.5 billion people on Earth who have no power at all, and must burn wood, animal dung or oil lamps in their homes for heat and light.
In our society, money is the only incentive for conservation that works. If power billing included infrastructure costs per unit of power used instead of a flat fee, using less power would actually result in lower bills. Real savings, real conservation.
Then, we could conserve our way to not needing three more high-voltage power lines in the province.
That would be no hollow accomplishment, at all.
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.