The Real Meaning of Earth Hour

Last Saturday, during "Earth Hour," I wrote a brief post about my own celebration of "Human Achievement Hour." (We celebrated it last year, too.) I found an excellent post by Keith Lockitch called "The Real Meaning of Earth Hour" that precisely and eloquently expresses the point.  

People don't have a clear view about what [a massive reduction in carbon emissions] would mean in practice. . . Participants spend an enjoyable sixty minutes in the dark, safe in the knowledge that the life-saving benefits of industrial civilization are just a light switch away. This bears no relation whatsoever to what life would actually be like under the sort of draconian carbon-reduction policies that climate advocates are demanding . . .

Forget one measly hour with just the lights off. How about Earth Month, without any form of fossil fuel energy? Try spending a month shivering in the dark without heating, electricity, refrigeration; without power plants or generators; without any of the labor-saving, time-saving, and therefore life-saving products that industrial energy makes possible.[1]

NOTES


1. Keith Lockitch, "The Real Meaning of Earth Hour," Capitalism Magazine, 25 Mar 2011, "http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/science/environment/earth-day/5475-the-real-meaning-of-earth-hour.html".

Keith Lockitch at the EUEC

Keith Lockitch from the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights spoke at the Energy & Environment Conference in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago, where he found himself quite alone among the 650 speakers - a heretic for freedom in the midst of voices clamoring for increased government regulations.

In the interview below, Dr. Lockitch relates some of his experiences at the conference and reminds us that despite some apparent recent victories for human beings (such as the failure of government officials at Copenhagen to fully shackle free nations), such victories are only temporary. What is required is a sweeping shift away from a culture of sacrifice to one of reason and egoism.

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin

“It is important to keep in mind,” writes Keith Lockitch:

that evolution by natural selection is a theory that pertains to all life on earth.  To prove a fundamental truth concerning all life on earth requires a range of facts and evidence drawn from every part of the organic world.  The scope of the evidence must be commensurate with the scope of the principle it supports - and evolution is the fundamental integrating principle of all biology.  [Note 1.]

Which man is it that spent his life seeking and accumulating vast quantities of data, “getting his hands dirty,” as Dr. Lockitch puts it, in the collecting and cataloguing of innumerable facts of nature?  Whose mind is it that organized, integrated, and finally grasped the implications of this material?  Who is it that published one of the most remarkable examples of scientific - indeed, human - achievement of all time, The Origin of Species? 

The man was Charles Darwin, born on this day, two hundred years ago.

Title page of a first edition of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, from Darwin200.

NOTES

1.  Keith Lockitch, “Darwin and the Discovery of Evolution,” The Objective Standard, Spring 2008, p. 48.

2.  Reproduction of the title page of The Origin of Species is from Darwin200, http://www.darwin200.org/.