Reflecting on “Earth Hour”

So, how painful was that, folks? Flick off a few lights, turn down the thermostat, shut off the TV, power down the computer for a short while… Like any of those minimal gestures impinged in the least bit on your absolutely fabulous “lifestyle” to any appreciable degree, or resulted in the slightest inconvenience at all… not much of a big deal at all really, was it? Of course it was almost entirely symbolic in nature, but that was the point — it wasn’t intended as a solution; at least not beyond bringing to light (so to speak) the obvious message that we have the free will and option to make deliberate choices as individuals about conserving energy and acting in an environmentally responsible manner, and that taken together all of these “small gestures” — as trivial and token as they may be — can collectively amount to something that may not be entirely insignificant in terms of reducing our overall impact on the planet’s finite resources, especially if such practices were to be more routinely exercised as a matter of course.

But quite aside from all that pious, enviro-righteousness, this little exercise served another purpose. And that was to point out (as if we didn’t already know) how absolutely kooky, paranoid and catastrophically stupid the so-called “conservatives” amongst us are when it comes to the addressing the serious environmental challenges we’re presently confronted with. They propose nothing constructive whatsoever and have absolutely ZERO to contribute in terms of making a positive difference. Instead, like the intellectual turtles they are, they recoil into their protective shells and solipsistically imagine that the world around them exists solely for the purpose of satisfying their own greedy, selfish pleasures. Even worse, the reaction of some of their ideological leaders to this initiative was, as some have quite astutely pointed out, one of vandalism and deliberate sabotage. How useless and counterproductive is that? Still others, rather than seeing this as a bit of a personal challenge they could quite easily rise up to meet, chose instead to fantastically imagine that it was some kind of communist conspiracy. What a laughable, pathetic bunch of assclowns.

How on earth can we ever make any headway with respect to the environmental front when these sorts of tragically dim-witted people are the guiding animus driving the CPoC? Is it any wonder that to date the government’s policy on this file as been so totally incoherent, muddled and demonstrably ineffective? The Liberals may not have a lot to crow about in this regard given their embarrassing past record of impotent, yet media-friendly lip-service, but at least they established the regulatory framework needed as a preliminary step towards taking positive action, and under Dion’s leadership, have expressed an apparently sincere willingness to address the problem of climate-change in a more serious fashion. Meanwhile, the “Conservatives” and their supporters appear quite happy to just remain perpetually “stuck on stupid” when it comes to this issue.

While a few lights may have been briefly dimmed for an hour or so last night, at the same time maybe this entirely painless and quite easily managed conceptual exercise has inadvertently provided us with another, highly revealing sort of illumination...

Update: “SDA Gets Results!”… Heh. More like Kate McMillan Jumps the Shark.