Re: Earth Hour

On Mar 29, 6:07 pm, Geoff <ge...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 29 Mar 2008 13:45:13 -0700 (PDT), JOF <jofran...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:





On Mar 29, 4:22 pm, dazed and confuzzed <dedmann@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Scott wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Hour#Earth_Hour_2008

what an asinine symbolic gesture.

One hour, of one day.

You think it's asinine to care a little bit about the condition of the
planet? Sure the hour won't fix anything on it's own account, but it
seems to me one of our own members takes the trouble to use some
pretty off the wall alternative fuels for his truck. Perhaps you
remember reading something about that?

What's so asinine about a whole lot of folks sending a message that
they care and are proactively encouraging more folks to get with the
programme, any programme, as long as it might help to get a little
more mileage out of our world as we know it?

JF

Because 1 hour out of 8760 in a year is 0.011% of that year and a 10%
reduction (optimistically estimating) for that 1 hour in a few cities
is a fraction of total annual energy consumption for the world.
Result: Empty gesture.

How many people even knew of it in advance? I know I didn't.

Want to get more mileage out of our world? 99.98% of energy received
on earth is solar. Amounting to about 1000 to 1550 Watts per square
meter depending on who you want to believe. This amounts to 127 x
10^15 Watts falling on Earth every day. How about lighting your city
with solar power instead of coal, nuclear or oil? You only have to do
1/2 the job too, the sun will do it the rest of the time. :)-

So nobody should do nothin'? That'll make the world a better place fer
sure. Your SUV only uses a fraction more fuel than your neighbour's
Prius. Your old windows only leak a fraction more heat than Low-E
glass. Your old furnace only burns a fraction more gas than your
neighbour's high efficiency furnace. Have you converted your home to
that solar heating system you say is so readily available? Why on
earth would you ever inconvenience yourself to help save the world?
I'll bet you don't believe anything in Al Gore's movie, or anything
his opponents say either. I agree that Gore may be dramatizing things
a tad, but somewhere in the middle ground we have a problem.

Hopefully those fractions won't come back to haunt your family when
your great great great grandkids are strangling from the preponderance
of pollutants in their air, or when they're freezing cuz there's no
fossil fuels left to heat their houses and the bleeding hearts are
dancing on their graves celebrating the victory over nuclear energy
production. We're losing ground to our consumerism. It's time to wake
up and smell the coffee.

JF
.

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