Cheat Seeking Missiles: Aussie "Earth Hour" Was Really "Hypocrites' Hour"

They turned off the lights in Sydney this week, eager to save the planet. What a fiasco.

It should have been easy enough. They picked for Earth Hour 7:30 to 8:30 on a Saturday night, when twilight lingered, offices were closed and shoppers had gone home. Still, security lights and street lights remained on, concerts were held, and soccer was played under great banks of flood lights.

Caroline Overington wrote in The Australian of the dreary, defeatist spectacle (if you can have a spectacle in the dark):

Consider this: the great switch-off was televised. No, really: Sky News and the BBC in London went live to the great power outage. Did that not strike anybody as, well, a touch absurd? How can people watch on TV an event involving a power switch-off? Also, the lights on the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge went out, as did lights on the Sydney Opera House. Sydneysiders, intrigued as to how this might look, promptly got into their cars and drove over the bridge to have a gander.

Surely, that produced more CO2 than all the light-switching saved.

Overington was tasked to interview the mastermind of Earth Hour, World Wildlife Fund's Greg Bourne, about the event the next day but couldn't find him ... he was jetting up to Singapore for an important conference on how to subject the rest of us to this depressing silliness.

In the process, Bourne's plane dumped on the weary planet about a quarter of the C02 that was allegedly saved during Earth Hour. Organisers say 24 tonnes of C02 was saved, but in fact none was saved, just stored, in effect, for later use. And it takes a tonne or three a person to fly to Asia; on the way back, he'd dump the same amount. Now, this may be stating the obvious, but if Bourne is serious about climate change, he should not be flying. He could have been tele-conferencing. Nothing else makes sense. But, then, much about Earth Hour didn't make sense.

Why do the Warmies feel they have the right to subject us to such fare? Overington says it well:

As everybody knows, Sydney is the most vibrant and liveliest of Australian cities, so it's no surprise that dour environmentalists decided that Sydney - glorious, glittering Sydney - should be the first Australian city to suffer through Earth Hour.

To your mud huts, everyone! We've got to regress together if we're going to win this global warming battle. It'll be tough, but don't worry! Our fearless leader Al Gore will be directing the battle from his 20-room, 8-bathroom energy guzzling home with the gaslights lining the drive.

And we'll have as our guiding ... er, ... light Li'l Kim Jong Il, who sees the light ... or lack thereof. Yes, in L'il Kim's North Korea, every hour is Earth Hour!