We’ve all seen them; the TFL staff standing beneath wall mounted bar heaters turned up full against the mild breeze blowing through the station. It’d be cheaper to throw tenners on an open fire if policies allowed for it. When I was younger, and indeed now, the central heating only goes on once you run out of jumpers.
The lights going off at 8pm on Saturday 28th March wasn’t the return of a Labour government, nor the solar eclipse, which holds the record number of people simultaneously NOT looking at their smart phones, but Earth Hour. Most people took this news with the vague shock of someone unexpectedly struggling to swallow a vitamin pill, but Earth Hour was established in 2007, to raise awareness to the need for sustainable energy; to remind people that when they switch their lights on someone somewhere mines coal, creates nuclear waste or charges fracking sites in a pink hi-viz vest. .
As a country complaining of energy bills and saying ‘it’s freezing’ before November and running out of adjectives before they do layers of clothes, it’s unlikely that the UK took Earth Hour as seriously as the Philippines, who organised a glow-in-the-dark Zumba party. These days most UK homes compete with Kew garden’s glasshouses. I know this because as a social worker for 18 years I visited homes, and they were invariably heated to the midday temperature of the Nairobi desert. The most effective intervention by politicians to reduce bills would be to visit homes and turn the thermostats down.
Increased awareness of energy consumption is a good thing. HSBC declared they would respect Earth hour by turning the lights off in their offices, at 8pm on Saturday night. What the hell were they doing on in the first place? Presumably they’re kept on all year round in order to demonstrate HSBC’s commitment to Earth Hour by turning them off for the hour
Of course electricity has transformed our lives, which sounds like the punch-line to every power station in-joke, and means we can bathe daily, blend kale & ginger smoothies effortlessly, read well past our bed time and iron our pink hi-viz vests. To go without lights for an hour has to be a good thing.
However, not everyone got involved. In Paris, due to security reasons, the Eiffel Tower went black for only five minutes, presumably to prevent too many people from walking into it, while in Singapore in 2014, all Earth Hour events were cancelled following the death of their founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, because nothing detracts from mourning like dimmed lights.
Electricity is taken for granted. Yet, while our countryside becomes increasingly industrialised by wind farms that make more money for landowners than electricity. The UK produces 1% of Co2 emissions, so it’s a good thing Extinction Rebellion are targeting the main culprits. Germans produces 2%, but China are on a whopping 29%. I’m not sure if there’s a prize. The problem is mankind is not going to stop wanting stuff. And India, Africa, Russia and China have rarely even started consuming yet.
If ending all aviation by 2025, which according to IPCC reports and mainstream climate models, would only reduce global temperatures by 0.03 degrees, I suspect that turning the heating down in a single NHS hospital might have a greater impact. Anyone having spent any time in hospital will have found nurses tutting and closing any scrumptiously opened windows and tuning up the thermostat to the El Azizia, Libya setting, AKA the hottest place on earth.
If consumers cannot take responsibility, then perhaps power companies could take the initiative. Like pulling the plug when we least expect it. Perhaps on Friday night, silencing hairdryers across the land, or for an hour during NFL’s Super Bowl, which appears to exist purely to annoy anyone who isn’t American. It really needs to be long enough for phone batteries to drain of power, than the stark reality of, well, reality, will bite hardest. After all, according to Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, there are now only two states for children: ‘asleep or online’, making them sound like robots, which anyone who’s met a teenager will readily agree with.
We’re disconnected from where the mains into our houses began, and groping around in the dark for an hour might sound fun, but it’s what humans had no choice about until 60 odd years ago. Renewables are commendable, yet there’s no palatable method of energy production, not to meet the demand; with the rate of population growth we need to ration our electricity use, and find the off switch as readily as we found the on.
Unfinished Business, the sequel to the WHSMith Fresh Talent novel the Life Assistance Agency, is out now. It is available at Foyles here:
https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/unfinished-business,thomas-hocknell-9781912666256
and at Amazon here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Assistance-Agency-Thomas-Hocknell/dp/1911129031/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
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A version of this post was previously published on LifeAssistanceAgency and is republished here with permission from the author.
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