“Earth Hour” is bullshit
March 30th, 2009 by benign0Why subject yourself to an hour of unsustainable inconvenience (and maybe have to miss a favourite TV show while you are at it) when leading a life that quietly reduces your “carbon footprint” on an on-going basis without all the grandstanding involved in half-arsed spectacles like “Earth Hour” is simple, easy, and sensible.
Here are a few things to consider as an individual:
Lose that monster clever marketers call a “sport utility vehicle”.
Desk warriors who buy SUV’s are victims of clever marketing. Using the latest in marketing techniques, the average urban schmoe is so completely persuaded by Big Business to cough up an extra $10,000 for equipment (such as an entire extra drive train) that will probably never be used over the life of the vehicle. And in case you think that a weekend spent every now and then in one of those “4WD Safaris” outside of city fringes justifies the obnoxious lump of metal on your driveway, think again about this “Earth Hour” you so recently participated in and wax poetic about and then that full tank of gasoline you burnt on the “trail” and consider the irony of it.
Think twice about buying “Made in China”.
Most of today’s garments and knick knacks are shipped thousands of miles from China and used all of two weeks on the average after which they end up in a landfill. Because they are so cheaply-produced, we;
:D use more of them;
:D keep them for shorter periods, and;
:D acquire them for progressively lamer reasons.
Next time you are in a mall and see a spoiled brat get a Happy Meal stuffed in front of her face and a Disney-licensed imported-from-China toy made of petroleum-based plastic presented lovingly to the kid to temporarily stem a tantrum, go up to her parent and ask if she participated in “Earth Hour”.
Besides, considering the on-going financial “crisis”, what’s the point of all these “stimulation package” handouts if they get spent on Chinese products?
Buy in bulk.
The biggest scourge of the planet is the proliferation of theindividually wrapped product. Nowadays products are marketed to us packaged in ever-smaller units (using, guess what, petroleum-based plastic). Of these products, I’d say “bottled water” ranks up there as the most ridiculous — most specially in countries where tap water is safe to drink and tightly regulated, sometimes as a matter of national security.
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There are many other examples out there of behaviours that we take for granted and, when regarded with a bit of thinking, make all this New Age crap about “Earth Hour” come across, quite frankly, as a crock of hypocritical crap.
Why do an “Earth Hour” when you can do an Earth Lifetime?
On that note, I shall go off and wonder how much fossil fuels were burnt producing the ads, printing the leaflets, and jetting around the world to promote “Earth Hour”.
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March 30, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Darn Aussies! They invented this idea. They can be worse than you know what nation of servile attitudes. Congratulations, Benign0, for whatever it is worth, you finally tickled my funny bone with your serious demeanor.
Now look at what the New Zealanders came up with for Earth Hour–
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHsOGckm4zM
They must’ve not gotten the idea, you know?
March 30, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Now here we have true insight.
Kudos, Benigs.
Yes, from one point of view you could prolly consider it tokenism.
Quite coincidentally the Aussies started this, right?
March 30, 2009 at 4:25 pm
To be totally safe, why not we do it every second, every minute…permanently! Let’s go back to the Stone Age.
March 30, 2009 at 5:05 pm
It’s take the average Filipino household 138 years to consume as much energy as Al Gore’s house consumes in one day.
March 30, 2009 at 5:07 pm
“It’s take” tuloy. They gave him the effing Nobel prize!!
March 30, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Huh! Now you’re sour graping because your beloved Philippines ‘topped’ the Earth Hour event. :)
March 30, 2009 at 6:23 pm
We professional environmental scientists KNOW that Earth Hour is just papogi points courtesy of big biz and WWF (and aside from stumbling in the dark, is likely harmless!). Turning off the switch is the easiest of environmental things you can do. But there are other “save the earth” activities that have more positive environmental impact.
One is planting a tree. You need an Earth 10 minutes to do this and you need not stumble in the dark since trees are NEVER PLANTED at night!
But Benigs you are fair dinkum! Taking care of trees (which really amounts to something!) requires an Earth lifetime!
March 30, 2009 at 7:49 pm
My suggestion? Air Hour. Let everyone hold his breathe for one hour to conserve oxygen. LOL.
March 31, 2009 at 1:14 am
or simply stop talking so we stop air pollution considering that most of us are foul-mouthed.. not you J. :)
al gore, the green planet proponent would jetset (in a private jet that is) that gorgles lots of aviation fuel so he can be in a speaking engagement in one place of the planet to lecture on preserving mother earth.
blogging adds up euphemistically and literally in the pollution of the planet. consider the hardware that you must have in order to sustain the blogsphere in the world. you have create of lot of highways made up of circuitries of switches, routers and cables that degrade in capabilities as technologies advance. to put it more simply: years back we were using an intel desktop 866 with 32 mb of ram and 500 mb of hard drive. after a year, we have abandoned those obsolete gadgets and progressed to pentium 2, then 3, then 4, then Dual Core Pentium in no less than 4 years.
the information highway was previously structured on cables running data at 10 mbps, then 100 mbps then you have the 3G technology. thus, you have to discard those routers, switches and servers and cables that support the old technology. you can see them now on landfills.
but the other type of pollution, our ignorance and bigotry we often comouflage as wisdom is the worst of its kind for after we spew them, they can never be morphed into a landfill. :)
March 30, 2009 at 8:18 pm
I still say that the most unbelievable commercial product of all is Bottled Water now for sale in practically all sari-sari stores around the world.
March 30, 2009 at 9:07 pm
And guess why cigarettes sold in two’s are sold in Pinas but not available in Australia?
March 30, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Filipinos will not participate at all if the activity involves planting trees. That’s so dirty you know. Baka maputikan ang kanilang shoes.
March 30, 2009 at 11:59 pm
earth hour is not just about switching off the light for an hour but precisely the things you enumerated.
now get back inside the roo’s pouch. make this baby step so you can make big leaps later.
March 31, 2009 at 12:39 am
Benigs,
Shouldn’t we be careful bewaring others to “Think twice about buying ‘Made in China’” because vis-à-vis our own exports (OFWs), “domestic assistant who holds a degree in international politics” may not sound as derogatory – or at least exerting caution against – as some bewail about.
And also, if you think of what happened to those Made in Japan in the 1950s (remember the derided Toyopets are now beauty and beast on the roads), aren’t the Made in the USA nuts practically licking the dust right now?
April 1, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Believe me Sir Abe, Pinay DH here in China are mostly not working with chinese people(maybe in HK,Singapore,Taiwan)and they are not so many here and till now they are “illegals” here considering the employers gave them work permits.Kasi napakarami paring mahihirap dito at namamatay sa gutom so yung pagiging DH daw e dapat trabaho yun nung mga walang pinagaralan dito sa kanila.Imagine I pay 50rmb per hour sa chinese DH at ang nililinis lang e yung nakikita nila bukod sa tamad ay dugyot pa so why hire them?ganyan ang katwiran ng mga expats dito kaya Pinay ang kinukuha nila at walang problema sa communication.
Ang mga Pinay DH dito ay di legal kahit na nga my WP sila,walang pakundangan ang mga police dito basta aakyatin ang bahay pag nalamang my pinay na DH at kakasuhan ang employer kaya walang maglakas ng loob na mainlander na kumuha ng Pinay DH.
March 31, 2009 at 1:40 am
Abe, don’t be so proud of “degree in international politics”. We don’t know what our students learned from their degree so do the pekeng-peryodistas’ attack on Lorelie which they denegrate her “intelligence” when pekeng-peryodistas totally LOST THEIR INTELLIGENCE in Ces Drilon News Blackout and not ONE! I repeat, NOT ONE! pekeng-peryodistas rediculed their low-IQ News Blackout.
NOT ONE! Because they don’t know what they’re doing in the first place.
March 31, 2009 at 2:38 am
Benign0, another way to save the trees is STOP READING PHILIPPINE NEWSPAPERS!!! Anyways, we are not learning anything from Philippine newspapers except taught us to make STUPID EXCUSES!
Once we stop reading Philippine newspapers, we are saving trees!
March 31, 2009 at 4:28 am
or we are practically putting into garbage all the write-ups and articles of these so-called pundits by not reading them. we save the trees and we save our sanity by refusing to be entertained by this garbage.
March 31, 2009 at 5:29 am
Well, reading them to be entertained by this news garbage is entertainment.
Forming intelligent opinions on news garbage is a garbage of opinion.
Garbage in. Garbage out.
PROFESSIONALIZE JOURNALISM!
March 31, 2009 at 12:50 pm
jcc,
I simply do not see how your comments connect with the blog nor any of other comments of commenters that followed it.
Where I sense, you seem to have chronic allergies with pundits, bigots, ignoramuses, garbage, pollution, camouflaged wisdom, et cetera.
Brotherly advise,it is time to overcome your own fears. For sure you can always say, with good reasons, that benigno’s blog is one of punditry, one of bigotry as anyone else whom you can just openly accuse, had you done so.
In any case, just read only the blogs you like. Keep things cool. For instance, the content of benigno’s blog, in truth, did not do justice to its purported title. You know styles always bring us to some place else especially when they just love high falluting.
April 1, 2009 at 3:05 am
nielsky,
so you are now the moderator of FV who can truthfully say what is relevant and what is not in the thread? welcome to blogging my brother or sister? :)
April 1, 2009 at 3:15 am
neilsky,
FYI, benign0 is one decent writer at FV and I never consider his punditry a pollutant. :)