Tim Blair has a posting showing before and after photos from The Age newspaper (above). It's clear that they have been doctored, as he demonstrates at his site by showing other photos of what Sydney really does look like at night. Why is it that those on the Left can't help themselves but promote such blatant lies in support of their totalitarian agenda?
The article accompanying the photo is:
SYDNEY'S icons switched off last night as the city embraced Earth Hour, an initiative designed to highlight global warming."About 65,000 households and 2000 businesses" is the estimate of how many people and organisations were involved. Even allowing for these types of organisations' history of wildly exaggerating public participation let's assume their numbers are correct for the purpose of analysis.
The Opera House, Sydney Harbour Bridge and Luna Park all went dark.
Australian actor Cate Blanchett described Earth Hour as a beginning. "It's a celebration of our awakening to climate change action," she said.
About 65,000 households and 2000 businesses joined the WWF Australia initiative, which is part of an effort to cut the city's greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent in the next 12 months.
Celebrities and dignitaries, including federal Labor leader Kevin Rudd, attended a function at Mrs Macquarie's Chair and watched the skyline go dark.
From the Australian Bureau of Statistics I find that the number of households in Sydney is around 1.5 million meaning that a whopping 4% of households participated. I'd need to know how they're defining business but given there are more than 300,000 in Sydney I can't see that getting less than 1% of them involved is anything to crow about.
Given the sponsorship by the Sydney Morning Herald, and having had to suffer through countless news segments promoting the event, I can't help but conclude that the public really isn't prepared to buy into the climate change issue if it's going to inconvenience it too much.
Has anyone done any work at all on what it will take to reduce Sydney's greenhouse gas emissions by 5% in just 12 months? This seems a particularly high target given the fact that Europe has imposed less strict targets and implemented a carbon trading scheme with the net result being that they're miles off target and the price of energy has risen by about 50%. Maybe they can ask Cate Blanchett how to do it without negatively affecting NSW's massively overtaxed and already brittle economy.
Joe Public isn't that dumb. People know that Climate Fascists are employing hysterical rhetoric in an attempt to bully people into submission. They know that wind power can't light our cities, that solar can't power our industrial sector and even that ethanol can't be produced in the quantities required to fuel our fleets of cars, trucks and aircraft. When the nuclear option is put on the table as the practical answer the same people that are promoting clean technologies immediately reject it, ostensibly on safety grounds, in spite of the fact that it's probably the safest industry in the world. Joe Public can see through that stuff.
I keep banging on about the priority of symbolism over results that animates the arguments and what passes for logic of the world's Left. With the Sydney Earth Hour we have yet another meaningless contribution to the issue that the public has not at all embraced. In that regard it joins the miserable Cool The Globe campaign undertaken by Channel 7, the result of which was a ratings disaster for the station as viewers stayed away in their droves.
Australia's Labor Party is in the process of preparing its own version of the Stern Review, which it will use in the run up to the next federal election due at the end of this year. It will be interesting to see how they assess the effect on employment by the direct loss of business to the more friendly environments of China and India, such as is already happening in post-Kyoto Europe. I predict that it will state that unless we elect a Labor government we're all doomed. You might be surprised to find that I think doom certainly will follow the election of a Labor government. In fact, if they do win the next election then I predict that Australia's GST, currently at 10%, will rise to somewhere in the 12-15% range with the excuse being that we need to subsidise clean technologies. I hope the electorate sees through some of this rubbish before it's too late.
UPDATED 3 April: Andrew Landeryou has a terrific post on the reality of this stupid stunt, which features the following graph of power usage on 18/3/07, 25/3/07 and 31/3/07. The two vertical lines represent the time of Earth Hour. The red line is power use on the day itself. What's that dirty great spike doing there in the two hour period before Earth Hour started? Green hypocrites.
4 comments:
We celebrate "Earth Hour" for about six hours every nite.
I just didn't know we rwe doing it. Maybe I oughtta start leving some lights on at nite, you know- show my support for global warning, or something...
What little faith the climate change crowd have in their own creed. They must lie and deceive to justify their actions - it is incredibly disappointing.
There are plenty of people in Australia who would willingly undertake conservation if it were presented without the hyperbole - it is sensible to restrict personal usage, even if only to reduce your own bills - this is done in most households by turning off lights and appliances when not in use. Nobody wants to spend money they don't have to.
To have these facistic idiots running around fear-mongering about "100 metre tides" and all the other overblown hype just impedes sensible discussion and action on issues. This issue is too serious for it to be a political football.
{rant}
Global Warming hysterics do not help. People such as Nicholas Stern and his acolytes are a dolts. To seriously suggest cutting energy use by 60-90% from todays usage in 43 years is ludicrous - just look at from your own position. How would you cut 60% out of your own usage? Go to work only three time a week for a start? Or are you going to bicycle? What about those who live 40+ km away? Are they to move closer? To where? Demanding that everyone else must change is arrogant idiocy.
{/rant}
Hello,
I was in the alternative energy business for 10 years during the 80s and early 90s. I have designed and built energy systems for single family homes and small apartment complexes. I have built windmills, PV arrays, solar thermal power generation systems, micro hydro, solar hot water heaters, solar whole house heating, and solar cooling systems.
The problem I have with the environmental nut jobs is that there are many things that could be done to reduce energy usage which are pretty simple and could be done right now, but the environmentalists never push for anything that is practical and short term, they only ever talk about schemes which would totally reshape society into their leftist vision of Utopia.
The best way to cut back energy usage in new homes is to design zero energy homes. All of the technology needed to create a zero energy home is available off the shelf from major manufacturers. I would say over half the energy savings don't even involve technology but can be achieved by design concepts that are incorporated into the home. Things like insulating the foundation walls instead of the floor, insulating the roof instead of the cieling, using radiant barriers with an air space on either side, putting a gasket anyplace wood meets wood or wood meets metal or wood meets concrete, using caulk and foamed insulation at any place air might infiltrate, using high cielings and ridge vents for cooling...well there is a pretty lengthy list of simple things that have an effect on energy usage.
It would be quite simple for the federal government to mandate zero energy new homes by modifying the building codes. Of course, builders, architects, and home designers would have to be educated in the techniques, but this education can be provided in the code itself by specifying the kind of things that need to be done to achieve zero energy.
I know this is going to be hard to believe but making a new home a zero energy home does not cost more (if you do it right).
Retrofitting an existing home to be a zero energy home is more challenging, but it can be done.
Now if you said that zero energy was too lofty a goal and I can sympathize with that viewpoint, there are some very simple things that could be put into the building code that would have a real impact on energy usage in new homes.
Here is something very simple. If you have a home in the Southwestern United States space cooling is your biggest energy usage. If you make the roof of the house white instead of black it cuts the cooling load by 50%. Also, for a house in the Southwestern United States, a solar hot water heater will supply 80% of the hot water needs, and hot water usually is about 20% of total energy usage.
I would guess that using simple techniques and off the shelf technology you could cut the energy usage of a typical tract house built before the mid 80s by 50%. What is required is for someone who understands how to do this to do an inspection of the house and then make the necessary energy saving enhancements. I'm not talking about solar panels on the roof here, I am talking about low tech things like using insulated doors, putting insulated watherstripping and an insulated threshold, insulating the hot water heater tank, things like that. Utility companies could make an inspection like this mandatory and then supply loans to do the work.
I would guess that if the government got serious about just making these kind of common sense modifications in the existing housing stock, energy usage could be cut by 40%.
When I do these energy usage inspections and then make a list of recommendations, PV panels are always at the bottom of the list and very few people actually use them because the other low tech improvements you can make are so cost effective that you get more than 70% of the energy saving benefit from 10-20% of the total budget (if you include PV panels in the budget). It's actually quite humorous because a lot of my customers are these suburbanites who are gungho on PV until they see the budget, and they end up doing all these really low tech things like caulking, and realize that PV just doesn't make economic sense, so they leave it out.
Terrific response, curious.
It is amazing that there are many things that we could all be doing right now that would make a difference but because they're not the proverbial Golden Bullet of Salvation the AGW crowd aren't interested. They are emotionally tied to a Big Solution for a Big Problem.
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