Sitting in the dark whilst the planet cooks from our self-indulgence

On Saturday millions of us spent our Saturday night illuminated by candlelight as part of the worldwide earth hour. The event has been heralded a great success as videos of famous landmarks plunged into darkness are being emailed to us by various organisations and news agencies. I however felt rather uncomfortable with the idea of watching TV by candle light. My low energy light bulbs are hardly energy hungry compared to the rest of the electrical equipment in my possession. Surely an all out electricity blackout would have made a more substantial comment on climate change? I thought this would have been a better idea and proceeded to turn off my heating and all electrical appliances that weren’t essential (fridge and freezer stayed on).

Sitting in the dark, trying to read by candle light I realised why my plan was flawed – who in their right mind would sit in the dark with nothing to do? And that is the problem. That is why WWF and the promoters of earth hour didn’t ask people to turn everything off. After the failure of earth day last year when electricity usage was actually higher than expected you can see why they set their sights a little lower. Sadly, it’s because of the trappings of the modern world, where everything we use consumes energy, that we have got to this stage. Even sadder still is that fact that very few people are prepared to face the truth that unless we force a real change in lifestyle, a complete paradigm shift, a change of perspective away from the all consuming, energy hungry lifestyle, to a more frugal, energy efficient one then all the earth hours in the world will not change the inevitable climate change and loss of what we take for granted now.

Having said that, I spent 5 minutes in the candle light trying to work out how to entertain myself before I turned on my laptop and watched a DVD using battery power. If some of the most ecologically minded people can’t cope an hour without electricity, then what hope does the world have?