Earth Hour and Beyond
So last night was “Earth Hour,” an attempt to avoid the utter destruction of the planet by having everyone turn off their lights for an hour. Attempts to quantify the actual impact of this action on energy use range from nil to negative, but then I suspect that this isn’t really the point. The whole affair reminds me of the following bit from Tim Harford’s book The Undercover Economist:
“How did you travel here today?”
“I’m sorry?” I’m puzzled. Here I am, going to a panel discussion organized by an environmental charity, and a very earnest young member of staff is grilling me before I even get past the door of the lecture hall.
“How did you travel here today? We need to know for our carbon offset program.”
“What’s a carbon offset program?”
“We want all our meetings to be carbon-neutral. We ask everyone who attends to let us know how far they came and on what mode of transportation, and then we work out how much carbon dioxide was emitted and plant trees to offset the emissions.”
“I see. In that case, I came here in an anthracite powered steamship from Australia.”
If planting trees is a good way to deal with climate change, why not forget about the meetings and plant as many as possible? (In which case, everybody should say they came by steamship.) If the awareness-raising debate is the important thing, why not forget about the trees and organize extra debates?
In other words, why be “carbon-neutral” when you can be “carbon-optimal,” especially since the meeting was not benzene-neutral, lead-neutral, noise-neutral, or accident neutral? Instead of working out whether to improve the environment directly (by planting trees), or indirectly (by promoting discussion), the charity was spending considerable energy keeping itself precisely “neutral” – and not even precisely neutral on all externalities, nor even a modest range of environmental toxins, but preserving its neutrality on a single, high-profile pollutant: carbon dioxide. And it was doing so in a very public way.
A kind view would be that the charity was setting a “good example,” if acting nonsensically can ever be a good example. An unkind view would be that it was indulging in moral posturing.
UPDATE: Russel Steele looks at the numbers and concludes that Earth Hour had no discernible effect on energy consumption in California.
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I haven’t read the book, BA – but from your description, I gather the purpose is to raise awareness of how much carbon is being used due to ones everyday activities?
A few years ago I decided to track every bit of money I spent for an entire month – and the results were eye-opening for me in terms of how much the “little” things – stopping off for a daily donut and cup of coffee, say – added up to an large amount (almost a hundred dollars!) at the end of the month.
The intent with showing carbon usage is similar , I suspect – each conference-goer must confront, in a way he’s not used to thinking about it, the actual cost to the planet of his attendance. I don’t see this as a bad thing.
Mmmmmm carbon.
“If planting trees is a good way to deal with climate change, why not forget about the meetings and plant as many as possible? (In which case, everybody should say they came by steamship.) If the awareness-raising debate is the important thing, why not forget about the trees and organize extra debates?”
If either-or thinking is good thinking, why bother ever thinking otherwise? If being a smart-aleck is so much fun, why not forget about moral posturing?
The intent with showing carbon usage is similar , I suspect – each conference-goer must confront, in a way he’s not used to thinking about it, the actual cost to the planet of his attendance. I don’t see this as a bad thing.
It strikes me this would only work if the conference growers were having to actually do something in order to make up for their “carbon usage” rather than simply telling some staffer how they got there so that something could be done behind the scenes.
For instance, tracking both the calories you eat and the amount of time on an exercise bike it takes to burn off those calories might incent you not to drink three cokes a day, or indeed to cut out coke entirely. However, having a fitness conference log the total consumption of everyone in attendance and then paying for “fitness offset” riders in China to bicycle away all their calories would merely be silly.
If either-or thinking is good thinking, why bother ever thinking otherwise? If being a smart-aleck is so much fun, why not forget about moral posturing?
When I first read this passage, several years ago, my reaction was similar. The more I think about it, though, the more I think Harford was on to something. (Hint: the title of the section in which this appears is titled “Is the Environment Too Important to be a Moral Issue?”)