It’s Earth Hour tonight. Remember to turn the clocks back to 1900

Yesterday’s post recommended celebrating electricity rather than finding it (or rather the fossil fuel which produced it) the villain. If using no electricity still sounds appealing then this video might give some perspective into such a life.

If 1900 still sounds like a place you would consider living. Consider this: 1900 dentistry.

Are you turning out the lights at 8:30 tonight? Leave a comment and say why you are or aren’t.

Earth Hour 2011: In the dark, again

“I am ashamed at the number of things around my house and shops that are done by animals—human beings, I mean—and ought to be done by a motor without any sense of fatigue or pain. Hereafter a motor must do all the chores.” – Thomas Edison.

During the World Exposition of 1873 in Vienna, Zénobe Gramme and his partner, Hippolyte Fontaine, were demonstrating their latest wonder, the reversible Gramme Dynamo (an electric generator), when a workman accidentally connected wires to a spare dynamo. The spare then began to run too. They had stumbled upon the first electric motor. It was a motor capable of turning belts and gears using electricity. Electricity could do more than power lights; it could move things.

Think of the electric things you use regularly. Lights, refrigerator, washer, dryer, clocks, heating, air conditioning, water pumps, television, phone, computer, radio…
What would you do if they no longer worked?

Tomorrow night, Saturday 26 March 2011 the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund, now simply initialized as WWF), wants people everywhere to give up electric light from 8:30 PM to 9:30 PM for Earth Hour. WWF says doing so shows people’s “commitment to the environment.” They say on their website, “But when the lights go back on, we want you to go beyond the hour and think about what you can change in your daily life that will benefit the planet.”

Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus, says it’s “one of the most successful publicity stunts ever dreamed up.” I understand why he says that. Earth Hour is gimmicky. Enduring an hour of candlelight is a symbolic gesture, at best. After all, it probably takes more energy to manufacture candles than light bulbs.

It appears more symbolism than publicity stunt; rather like forehead ashes on a Christian on Ash Wednesday. Could it be more than coincidence that Earth Hour and Lent occur in March? Lent is a spring observance where practicing Christians give up certain foods and/or practices for 40-days. Earth Hour is a spring observance where practicing environmentalists forgo electric lighting for one hour (though you are urged to do more).

Perhaps sackcloth and ashes are in order?

At the risk of being simplistic, here is the greater change that Earth Hour sponsors want to come over you:

Be more self-sufficient. Do with less—of everything. Live a “make do or do without” life. Why? Because, according to E. F. Schumacher, “highly self-sufficient local communities” will be “less likely to get involved in large scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade.” Eco-topia.

The most self-sufficient people on earth have no money. More than one-half of humanity live Earth Hour around the clock. Besides living without electric lights, toaster ovens, microwaves, washers, dryers, dishwashers, electric clocks, waffle irons, or hair dryers; they use dung, dry grass, wood, or coal to light and warm their homes and cook their meals. The lack of electricity means dirtier indoor air, which causes increased death and debilitation from cancer, lung and heart disease. Self-sufficiency equals poor health and poverty.

It is always Earth Hour in North Korea.

So, as a suggestion, here is an experiment: instead of just turning off your lights for one hour, go to the master switch and turn off everything—for forty days. Collect water for washing clothes and dishes; get firewood to heat, cook and light your house with (you may substitute dried grass or dung, or coal for firewood if you wish). Sorry about the refrigerator, you will just have to do without the convenience of food preservation. On the plus side, you can learn all about medieval cooking and food-storage techniques.

 

With the discovery of electric motors, Zénobe Gramme and his partner Hippolyte Fontaine made washing machines and other labor-saving products possible. These made everyone more productive and freed many from forced labor. As professor of economics Ross McKitrick points out, “Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation…Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances…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.”

Let us celebrate the miracle of electricity, not demonize it.

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Sustainable forest certified beer

The Italian micro-brewery Foglie d’Erba (Leaves of Grass) earned first prize in the category “Anglo-American origin hoppy beers” with their PEFC certified beer at the recent Sapore Beer Festival, held in Rimini, Italy in February. PEFC is the world’s largest forest certification system.

“Certification is often only associated with wood-based products,” explained Dr. Antonio Brunori, National Secretary of PEFC Italy, “but in the Southern Mediterranean region, we are seeing rapid growth in non-wood forest products such as tree oils and mushrooms to meat from animals bred and fed exclusively in PEFC-certified forests. A natural extension of this is, as in all great civilizations, the brewing of beer!”

386 beers from 82 Italian breweries competed in the Sapore Beer Festival, which was organized by the Italian Union of Beer Producers, Unionbirrai. “Sapore is Italian for ‘taste,’ and we are delighted that our PEFC-certified beer is recognised by true connoisseurs,” enthused the creator of the beer, Gino Perissutti of Foglie d’Erba. “Our beer is the first – and so far only – beer in the world to achieve PEFC certification, as it is flavored with pine needles, pine cones, and resin, which are all collected from PEFC-certified forests.”

“The award becomes all the more special as the judges commended Foglie d’Erba’s strong commitment to the environment and tiesto local ecology – the fact that the beer is PEFC-certified was also a plus,” concluded Dr. Brunori.

Are the data clear and incontrovertible?

University of California at Berkeley Professor of Physics Dr. Richard Muller asks if the climate data are clear and incontrovertible? Answer: no, because they were very much tinkered with. You can’t say that the climate operated one way before 1960 and another way after 1960. Data are data.

What should Mann, et. al. have done?

“Science is and always has been a work in progress,” said a scientist talking about a prediction he made about when a glacier would be gone. “As scientists, we publish the data based on our best understanding of that data at the time. That is the way science works.”

In other words, the data speak for themselves.

As we gallop toward 7 billion people, what can yeast teach us about population?

Love in the key of fermentation

This was written during February, the month with Valentine’s Day, which leads our thoughts to yeasts. Okay well, love. But love can lead to sex, and that leads to reproduction. Yeasts may not know about love, but they do know reproduction. So do we humans: our population here on planet earth will pass seven billion sometime this fall.

While making our bread dough rise or fermenting our potent potables, yeast eat and eat and eat, burping carbon dioxide and excreting alcohol as they go. Along with eating and excreting, they reproduce and reproduce and reproduce. While yeasts’ ability to double its population are infinite, its food supply and its environment are not. When they run out of food or poison their environment, they die as quickly as they bred.

The Reverend Thomas Malthus might have been thinking of yeast when he wrote an “Essay on Population” in 1798. The rev fretted that the human population could grow geometrically while our food supply could grow only arithmetically. We would, just as yeast do, grow too rapidly, and overtake our food supply (or poison our environment), thereby loosing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with their deadly scythes of war and high food prices (The book of Revelations speaks of a “quart of wheat” costing a day’s wages). After which, as they say on the cartoon series, Futurama, “We’re boned.”

You might well argue that we have more sense than one-celled organisms (then again, if you have seen such television shows as “Jersey Shore” or “Jackass,” your skepticism is understandable).

Korean Peninsula at night

Such well-respected academics as Jared Diamond reference Malthus, but they also toss in our society’s consumerism. Indeed, in Professor Diamond’s bestseller, “Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” he warns that the West, “consumes 32 times more resources, such as fossil fuels, and puts out 32 time more wastes, than do inhabitants of the third-world;” worrying that the “low impact” people of the developing countries are becoming “high impact” people.

View from space of “low impact” North Korea and consuming South Korea

I question the low impact of low-consuming developing countries. After all, according to defectors from North Korea, the average “low impact” peasant lives more of a hunter-gatherer existence with the countryside paying the price. In the book “Nothing to Envy,” Barbara Demick says these non-consumerist peasants made “ Barbara Demick says these non-consumerist peasants made “traps out of buckets and string to catch small animals in the field…stripped the sweet inner bark of pine trees to grind into a fine powder that could be used in place of flour.” And, because they were desperate, “They picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals.”

I have no doubt that some of us consume excessively. Why would anyone need a Ferrari Français : Ferrari 458 italia equipe JMW ( pil...458 Italia, with its 274 cubic-inch engine, 0-60 in less than four seconds, boasting a maximum speed over 200 mph, and costing about one-quarter million dollars? Answer: because it’s cool; and because at least for males, we seek prizes to indicate our status and sexual worth within the tribe. That, and the car is s-o-o-o cool. I mean look at it…I apologize, where was I?

Even if our consumption is occasionally overly indulgent, let’s be clear: The world is getting cleaner, more livable for people and animals, safer, and more sustainable than it has ever been. Consider this from Matt Ridley’s book, The Rational Optimist, “In Europe and America rivers, lakes, seas, and the air are getting better all the time…Swedish birds’ eggs have 75 per cent fewer pollutants in them than in the 1960s. American carbon monoxide emissions are down 75 per cent in twenty-five years.” In fact, “Today, a car emits less pollution travelling at full speed than a parked car did in 1970 from leaks.”

“Okay,” you might be saying, “That doesn’t matter, we are running out of room to put everyone. We need to stop having so many babies!”

We are not breeding as if we were yeast cells.

Over the past forty years, the whole world has seen dramatic drops in birth rates with a demographic transition from high infant mortality and high birth rate to lower infant mortality, and lower birth rate. The United Nations projects that the number of children per woman will drop below replacement value in 2025—and continue falling. Current momentum will take the world’s population up to around nine billion, after which it, too, is expected to drop.

So, as you sit watching your television and drinking a beer, remember what yeasts do. That, as John Ciardi said, “Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.” And be thankful you are not like yeast.

Cheers.