An hour without power

I was torn between either watching the UNC-Louisville game last night or non-stop blogging for the duration of "Earth Hour" last night at 8. As you can tell by looking at the blog, I chose March Madness. Is there anything more annoying in our political climate than the self-righteous environmentalist wackos? Besides the closely related animal-rights activists at PETA?

I have another rhetorical question. Is there a more perfect way to sum up the absurdity of the "sustainability" fetish than by having all the ecotards turn off their electricity for an hour? Somebody should tell the wanna-be Captain Planets that the DVR is still using power to record The Amazing Race 14.

The Sydney Opera House to San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge went dark as people switched off lights in their homes and skylines dimmed around the world on Saturday to show concern with global warming.

China's plastic bag factory must have missed the memo.

Up to 30 million people were expected to have turned off their lights for 60 minutes by the time "Earth Hour" -- which started in Suva in Fiji and Christchurch in New Zealand -- completed its cycle westward.

More than 380 towns and cities and 3,500 businesses in 35 countries signed up for the campaign that is in its second year after it began in 2007 in Sydney, Australia's largest city.

"Earth Hour shows that everyday people are prepared to pull together to find a solution to climate change. It can be done," said James Leape of WWF International, which was running the campaign.

Nah James, Earth Hour shows that everyday people, by and large, don't want to adopt your fascistic agenda, but through your green-lensed glasses, all you see is your underlings keeping the H3 and Lexus Hybrid in the four car garage for an hour, while they eat some vegetable chips and hummus and read An Inconvenient Truth by candlelight, thinking that somehow they're saving the whales.

In a tip of its virtual hat to the event, the background of Google's home page turned to black from white on more than a dozen country sites including Google.com. A message on the site read: "We've turned the lights out. Now it's your turn." and directed visitors to conserve energy when using computers.

Unfortunately, making the background black, while an excellent symbolic gesture, actually uses more energy, thus displaying the detachment of liberal doctrine from practical application and end results. (Link courtesy of Steyn at The Corner.) Oh wait, they aren't detached from applicable results, they just don't care.

Organizers of Earth Hour said that while switching off a light for one hour would have little impact on carbon emissions, the fact that so many people were taking part showed how much interest and concern at the climate crisis had taken hold. They said they plan a similar event March 28, 2009.

Who needs to actually do thing to save the environment when you have thousands of mindless followers worldwide willing to bend to your every whim, provided you attach an unsubstantiated, bogus cause to it?