House of Eratosthenes

In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour.

Here is my response.

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.
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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.
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I like visiting nature but I don’t want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.

Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics
University of Guelph

Civilization is at an impasse. Up until, I think, somewhere around the mid-1950’s technology had the capability to sprint or walk or hop or skip or mosey or whatever it wanted to do, onward, forward into the future. As fast or as slow as it cared to. If people hated it, they could go ahead and hate just as much as they wanted to. But you can only keep Rearden Metal off the market so long. If the laws of physics made it possible for something to happen, and someone figured out how to do it, but our busybody bureaucrats had a bee up their butts about it…it would happen.

I think the time has come to recognize those days are in twilight, and have been for quite some time. Where human achievement is in conflict with human rules, the rules will yield for a little while…until such time as they have had time to organize. And then achievement must give way. Unless — and this is key — it has taken the initiative to organize itself into a political movement. To become as firm and as unrelenting as the destructive forces that are about to assail it.

If it persists in flickering away like a candle flame just because it can…ignoring all of the human reactions to it…it will not be flickering long. Someone will come along and blow it out. They’ll blow harder and harder, until the flame flickers no more. Unless the flame fights back somehow.

I know something personally about this. Frankly, I have learned something personally about this, far more times than I care to have learned it…I know more about it than I care to. We’ll discuss the particulars of that some other time.

But I’ve not yet seen this fail. When human resourcefulness triumphs over the laws of physics and the forces that bind the known universe, that is an action. You know what they say about actions…equals & opposites & all that. We may not like to admit it, but that is part of the human condition as well. Until the final beat of the last surviving human heart, as long as there are people building things there will be people laboring to destroy those things. Even the new things. Especially the new things. If all you know how to do is destroy, you don’t want to see anybody else building anything.

Speaking of snagging …. I think I need to go snag that! That’s great!
- philmon | 03/26/2011 @ 17:49
That essay was pure gold. I especially liked this line:

For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance.

There’s a reason human civilization broke out of the Middle Ages and pushed forward at developing new technology, starting from around 1500 AD on. People had been living that way for thousands of years, and were starting to get tired of it. I can’t say I blame them.

All three of these maladies are still with us today, but it can at least be said now that there are vast swaths of the globe where they’re kept to a minimum. I live in the US. I don’t sit around worrying that my town is going to be sacked and burned by horsemen from a rival tribe or clan. People living in the 1200s did have that kind of concern, even people in Europe.
- cylarz | 03/28/2011 @ 00:01

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“I Abhor Earth Hour”Saturday, March 26th, 2011

“I Abhor Earth Hour”
Saturday, March 26th, 2011