What they are turning off are their brains

by John Hayward 

Posted 03/25/2011 

This Saturday at 8:30 PM, trendy environmentalists, arrogant liberals, and the people dim enough to follow their lead will unite by plunging themselves into darkness to celebrate “Earth Hour.” This is supposed to somehow “take a stand against climate change,” according to the organizers.

Earth Hour is mostly of interest to the thinking people of the world because we like to turn on all our lights, and make fun of the poor chumps stumbling around in the dark with candles. If you’ve always wanted to see if a full-scale model of the Bat Signal really would paint a giant bat on low-hanging clouds, tomorrow is the perfect night to fire that baby up. Michelle Minton of the Competitive Enterprise Institute offers more thoughts along those lines here.

Let’s pause a moment to follow the stated agenda behind Earth Hour. The point behind switching off all the lights is to make a statement that our modern lifestyle, with its high energy consumption, is causing “climate change” (they called it “global warming” when they started, but duly adopted the new language when the people in charge of the global-warming hoax realized it had become impossible to sell, beyond the hardcore faithful.)

In other words, our irresponsible consumption of resources is poisoning the atmosphere and producing an unsustainable environment. The organizers of Earth Hour want you to “take a stand” against this by temporarily ceasing all consumption of these energy resources.

Why are the same people so violently opposed to a government shutdown?

Out-of-control government spending consumes scarce resources and produces a completely unsustainable environment. Unlike “climate change,” this is not an exotic religious belief, sustained by fraud and intimidation tactics. Nobody has to bend any curves or manufacture phony “hockey stick” graphs to prove the near-term insolvency of the federal government. It’s not a vague threat centuries in the future, with a tenuous connection to human activity that no one can prove. It’s coming in your lifetime, it didn’t have to be this way, and we can stop it with dramatic action.

It will be impossible to avert the financial collapse of our government without cutting off the funds to madcap environmentalist initiatives. It can’t be done without increased productivity from industrial growth, which is driven by fossil fuels. Americans are not just facing a future without electric lights for a few hours, now and then. They are facing a future without hope, without opportunity, without food.

We should be “taking a stand” against this by shutting off the lights at government buildings, not private homes, and for a lot more than one hour a year. Trendy celebrities and upscale liberals sipping wine by candlelight at 8:30 on Saturday are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Their beliefs have nothing to do with a terrestrial environment they don’t understand. They are more concerned with reducing the populace to a more primitive state, where they can be more easily and thoroughly controlled. Flip on some extra lights Saturday to demonstrate the utter futility of their quest to control your life.