Human Achievement Hour

The gift of lighting

Light in North & South Korea

by Julie Kirsten Novak

It’s that time of year again when that rag‑tag coalition of conspicuously compassioned doctor’s wives, tambourining hippies still living as if they’re in the ‘60’s, ‘hug a whale’ do‑gooders, humanity =camphylobacter misanthropes, anti‑coal wowsers, and eco‑warriors brainwashed by standardised school curricula exhort the general public to replicate North Korea by turning off the lights for Earth Hour 2011.

The practical curiosity and problem-solving inclination of previous generations to seek to transform night into day, for mass convenience, started to produce real outcomes from 1800. The English chemist Humphry Davy connected two pieces of wire to a battery with a piece of charcoal between the ends of the wires. The carbon fragment glowed, producing light.

Successive generations of scientists, such as Joseph Wilson Swan, Henricg Globel, and Charles Francis Bush, made significant steps towards improving the durability of electric lighting. In the case of Bush, he manufactured carbon arcs that successfully lit up a public square in Cleveland, Ohio.

It wasn’t until the exhaustive efforts of Thomas Alva Edison that carbon filaments were developed that could deliver quality output of light for lengthy hours. In 1879, Edison discovered that a carbon filament in an oxygen‑free bulb could glow for 40 hours. Eventually, he produced a light bulb that could glow for over 1,500 hours.

One can only imagine the expressions of bemusement, and perhaps shock, on the faces of these great men if they were alive today to witness the deliberate shunning by a considerable minority across Australia today of the wondrous things they created.

Of course, in a free society, people can choose to simulate the miserable existence of a world without electric lighting, be it produced primarily by black or brown coal. The Earth Hour devotees are certainly free to practice what technological regress feels like for a period of one hour per annum.

The freedom of these people to partially throw back to an era prior to the Stone Age, thankfully, does not interfere with my freedom to act as though Earth Hour doesn’t exist or even to throw on all my light switches in celebration of the marvel of living in the modern world.

The ‘turn off the lights’ Earth Hour‑style campaigning starts to become objectionable, to my way of thinking, when its advocates seek, in other instances, coercive government interventions to make it harder for ordinary folk to enjoy numerous, consecutive Human Achievement Hours (aka just getting on with life) in the most inexpensive manner possible.

The merry‑go‑round of eco‑churn, in which governments fork out hard‑earned taxpayers’ money to environmental NGOs that, in turn, lobby the same governments to introduce artificial ‘carbon pricing’ regimes was highlighted by recent research from the IPA researcher Asher Judah. As I indicated in a recent piece this churning is really the thin edge of the wedge when it comes to the emergent climate change state, which will certainly expand rapidly if a carbon tax is imposed upon the Australian populace.

If the Earth Hourettes want to huddle together in a darkened camp-out under their own roves then leave them to their own sorry devices. By the same token, they will, hopefully, have the good sense and civility to not make it more difficult for the majority to keep using the gift of lighting to their heart’s content, and at affordable prices.