Earth Hour will be Happy Hour for some: a topical ad for Hachette Australia via US, Sydney
March 25 2011, 11:46 am | | 6 Comments
One hour of extra feeding time is definitely worth supporting. This ad for Hachette Australia, via US, Sydney, ran in today’s MX newspaper.
6 Comments
Caxton
Cool insight into how vampires can only feed when the lights are switched off. Oh, hang on…
Sweet
bloody waste of energy
No one has put the whole Earth Hour thing into better perspective than the Canadian journo who wrote this:
“I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.
Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water. Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases. Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.
The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity. People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.”
1:41pm
Don’t worry you’re not alone. Despite the relentless self serving spin Earth Hour was a total failure this year. Even the SMH (who sponsor it) reported today that only 4 in 10 Sydneysiders took part. It will fizzle and find its own level.