Last year, writes Jason King, on the last Saturday in March, Google’s white background turned black, as a symbolic gesture for 2008′s “Earth Hour.”
They accompanied this gesture with a puzzling rationale:
As to why we don’t do this permanently — it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display.
Such a gesture, done with an almost Faustian acceptance that such a gesture will make no meaningful impact on anything, demonstrates everything that is wrong with Earth Hour in its prizing of style over substance.
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The event is promoted simply as the socialist ritual it is. Those who see through to the underlying religiosity are not moved by the spectacle itself.
Jason, FYI:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/03/31/the-mises-blog-on-climate-change-a-beacon-of-quot-dim-rhetoric-quot.aspx
Sincerely,
TT
For all your talk of “the law of unintended consequences” you seem to struggle with the basics of “intended consequences.”
So the black Google was tokenistic. So Earth hour in general is largely symbolic. No disagreement there.
But it’s supposed to be. Of course it doesn’t have any impact in ‘real’, immediate, terms. But it’s not supposed to. What these kinds of symbolic gestures are designed to do is change long term behaviour by raising awareness! They’re supposed to get people thinking long term, and any first year advertising student can tell you exactly how this happens.
It’s supposed to trigger a reaction the next time someone thinks about driving to the local corner store, whether the light needs to be on during the day, how their choices as consumers impact the environment, how cold their fridge really needs to be, how they vote – in short, how their choices and behaviour affects the environment overall.
All of these things taken on their own have a very small impact. Taken together it has the potential to inspire a cultural shift in the way we take our environmental impact for granted.
I certainly wouldn’t identify myself as an Environmentalist, but I can at least grasp what they’re trying to do, and can recognise the importance of it.
…if only we can create the new, environmentally-aware man.
…or even better, person. And it would be hard to argue that there isn’t already a rising awareness of eco-footprint, so to an extent it’s already happening. Environmentalists are essentially using the same techniques companies have been using for decades. But why don’t we hear Libertarians railing about the insubstantial symbolism of a Coke ad that tries to get you to buy their product by having a bunch of douchebags playing volleyball?
One works and the other doesn’t? One is good and the other is socialism? Come on. It’s these types of ideologically driven inconsistencies that gives the impression some Libertarians are driven by dogma themselves, for all their condemnation of the ‘religious’ socialists.
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