Let's move to Mars

So kids, the 22nd of last month was Earth Day.

Did you get involved? I did my part by planting a few trees down at the park. I didn’t have any compost on me, so I paid a local homeless man to take a dump on my chest the soil. Earth day is all about helping the environment, and I’m all over that like pubes on soap.

Earth Day follows hot on the heels of Earth Hour, which occurred on Saturday the 28th of March at 8:30pm. Earth Hour being, of course, the hour of the year when everybody turns their lights out for 60 minutes. You see children - light bulbs, those pretty little balls of fire that keeps us out of the dark, well they are killing us. Every light bulb is letting off green house gases into the environment, which attacks the Ozone layer and makes the man in the moon cry big salty cheese tears.

While I got involved in Earth Day, I shamefully did not get involved in Earth Hour at all.

I didn’t actually hear about Earth Hour until the 29th, the day after – when I spotted an Earth Hour poster in a shop window. You can imagine my shame at missing it. At 8:30pm that particular night I had every light on in the house, plus my TV, Playstation, computer, half a dozen lava lamps and my Spongebob night light by my bed (which scares the monsters away). At about 9:00pm I got bored, so threw a bunch of ants in the microwave and watched that for a while. After that I cranked up C&C Music Factory’s Gonna Make You Sweat on my stereo at full volume, then went out in my backyard and opened and shut my remote control garage in time with the ”Everybody Dance Now” chorus. I thought this would make my neighbours happy, but instead they came out on the street and glared at me. I didn’t realise why this was until the next day – it was Earth Hour, and I was supposed to be conserving energy.

Fuck.

Oh well, maybe next year.

I had to say that the Earth Hour project piqued my interest, so I decided to do some research. There are 8760 hours in a year, half of which are nighttime. So we turned our lights off for 1 out of the 4380 hours of darkness for 2009. I opened my Microsoft Office Calculator to work that out as a percentage:

So we reduced our annual energy output by 0.0228 percent.

Wow.

But wait, there are more calculations that need to be made to that figure. As not every country in the world participated in Earth Hour (107 didn’t bother), and out of those countries that did join in – not every city signed up, and out of those cities that did participate – not every household got involved (and I’m sheepishly putting my hand up there kids).

So taking these statistics into consideration I tried to find the new percentage. The Calculator gave me this answer:

Again, Wow.

Earth Hour feels like the classic “Environmental Quickie”. We rape and Pillage Mother Earth all year long, then take a breather for an hour, then suck each other’s dicks about how fantastically well we all did.

..The New York U.N. headquarters conservatively estimates that its participation will save $102 in energy…

…Swedish electricity operator Svenska Kraftnät recorded 2.1% decrease in power consumption from its projected figure between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m…

Who cares?

In other news: I pulled two sesame seeds off my Big Mac and gave them to a starving street kid. Do I get a medal?

Of course, there’ll be those quick to point out the misdirection of my acrimony. “Beef! Earth Hour isn’t about turning lights off for an hour, it’s about drawing attention to the Earth’s energy crisis!” they’ll scream at me, spitting lentils and bongwater all over my face.

The actual of target of my rancor is the world leaders and major cities getting behind this agenda.

You see, Hippies are annoying, but they are essentially harmless. They smoke too much weed and get bored of their hacky-sacks and decide to go off on some moral crusade. They are forever farting against thunder with their insignificant protests ( HippieGirl has joined the facebook group “I think the war in Iraq is bad” - yeah, well done sweet heart, that’ll bring the troops home), but they are best left to their own devices. World leaders, however, have no excuse.

Case in point: the symbolic use of the world’s monuments. The Media was riddled with pictures of famous landmarks, that are usually drenched with floodlights, darkened for one solemn hour.

Fantastic you turned the fucking things off for an hour, but what about the other 4,379 hours of the year when these Energy Vampires churn through kilowatts, spewing galaxies of greenhouse gases into the stratosphere? It’s like punching your Grandma in the face for a full day, then giving her a half hour break to watch Matlock, and declaring yourself a humanitarian.









(The Eiffel Tower uses 580,000 kilowatt hours just on lights – the actual total energy consumption per year is 7.5 million kilowatt hours. Fuck.)

Here’s the thing about monuments, most of them are found in the middle of their cities, and more often than not they are really, really fucking big. So do we really need to light the fuckers up like Halley's Comet every night?

Can you spot the Coliseum in this photo? Neither can I.

Oh wait, there it is.

So Earth Hour in March, and Earth Day in April. I’m guessing Earth Minute is coming up later this month where we all hold our breath for 60 seconds to conserve our precious oxygen reserves.

When does this all end? The insecticides and building materials our grandparents used turned out to be fucking poisonous. Now I’m being told my god damn lights are killing the atmosphere. A few years from now I’ll see on the news that Plasma TVs give you nut cancer, and that I-Pods are directly responsible for causing the Moon to evaporate.

Fuck it all.