Quotulatiousness

April 18, 2013

Could this be the long-hoped-for breakthrough in battery technology?

Filed under: Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:40

In The Register, Tony Smith discusses a new prototype battery that might be coming to your electronic devices … eventually:

Electronics continue to shrink to ever smaller sizes, but researchers are having a tough time miniaturising the batteries powering today’s mobile gadgets. Step forward, bicontinuous nanoporous electrodes.

Smartphones use smaller power packs than they did five years ago, it’s true, but that’s because their chips and radios are more power efficient, not because of any major new battery technology.

Now boffins from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reckon they have come up with a new pocket-friendly electricity supply.

Enter the “microbattery”, a compact power cell constructed from many three-dimensional nanoporous electrodes capable, its developers claim, of delivering both high power and a large energy capacity.

The negative cathode was devised by another team at the university, but graduate student James Pikul, working under Bliss Professor of mechanical science and engineering William King, figured out how to create a compatible anode and put the two into a battery.

[. . .]

The cathode design, devised by a team led by the University’s Professor Paul Braun, is fast charging. Pikul reckons building a battery out of it yields a rechargeable that can be filled up in a thousandth of the time it takes to charge a comparably sized regular rechargeable cell.

Building a battery in a lab is one thing. Working out how to manufacture it commercially at a price that makes it a realistic power source for future devices is another thing altogether. Pikul and King will be working on that next.

April 11, 2013

Ontario’s Green Energy Act is pushing the province to the top … of the retail electricity price table

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Ontario loves to be at the top of rankings, but Ontario electricity users should be upset that we’re surging to the top of this particular ranking:

Ontario’s Green Energy Act (GEA) will soon put the province at or near the top of North American electricity costs, with serious consequences for the province’s economic growth and competitiveness, concludes a new report from the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian think-tank.

“Already, the GEA has caused major price increases for large energy consumers, and we’re anticipating additional hikes of 40 to 50 per cent over the next few years,” said Ross McKitrick, Fraser Institute senior fellow and author of Environmental and Economic Consequences of Ontario’s Green Energy Act.

“The Ontario government defends the GEA by referring to a confidential 2005 cost-benefit analysis on reducing air pollution from power plants. That report did not recommend pursuing wind or solar power, instead it looked at conventional pollution control methods which would have yielded the same environmental benefits as the GEA, but at a tenth of the current cost. If the province sticks to its targets for expanding renewables, the GEA will end up being 70 times costlier than the alternative, with no greater benefits.”

[. . .]

The study shows that the GEA’s focus on wind generation is particularly wasteful: 80 per cent of Ontario’s wind-power generation occurs when electricity demand is so low that the entire output is surplus and must be dumped on the export market at a substantial loss. The Auditor General of Ontario estimates that the province has already lost close to $2 billion on surplus wind exports, and figures from the electricity grid operator show the ongoing losses are $200 million annually.

The wind grid is also inherently inefficient due to the fluctuating nature of the power source. The report calculates that due to seasonal patterns, seven megawatts of wind energy are needed to provide a year-round replacement of one megawatt of conventional power.

“Consequently, the cost of achieving renewable energy targets for the coming years will be much higher than the Ontario government’s current projections,” McKitrick said.

March 28, 2013

British energy prices graphically explained

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

At The Register, Lewis Page debunks the propaganda from the government and shows the cost components of British energy prices from the government’s own published source:

The government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, with the current minister as mouthpiece, has just pushed out a report claiming that its green policies are saving us money now and will save us even more in coming decades. Can it be true? We can save the planet — or anyway reduce carbon emissions — and it not only costs nothing, but puts money in our pockets?

In a word, no: of course not. If that was true there would be no need for government action, we’d be acting to reduce carbon emissions on our own. And indeed, once you skip the foolish tinned quotes and bogo-stats in the executive summary, the report itself makes it very clear that in fact green policies are already to blame for most of the sustained climb in electricity prices we’ve suffered over the past decade — and that it’s going to get a lot worse.

The blue and brown bars are what you would pay without green intervention. The rest is thanks to the greens.

The blue and brown bars are what you would pay without green intervention. The rest is thanks to the greens.

So there you are, plain as day. The various green interventions in the UK and EU energy markets which have come in since the turn of the century are already costing you a hefty sum — the government have already forced up the price you pay for electricity today by nearly 20 per cent over where it would have been if they’d left matters alone. If they carry on as planned, by the year 2030 they will have managed to drive it up by more than a third over where it would normally be.

March 23, 2013

Human Achievement Hour 2013

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Oh, right. It’s once again time for the Gaia-worshippers to do an hour’s penance for the crime of being alive in an industrialized society. The Competitive Enterprise Institute proposes a different way of using that hour:

On Saturday, March 23 at 8:30pm (local time), some people, businesses and governments around the world will choose to sit in the dark for one hour as a symbolic gesture to take action against climate change. The organizers of Earth Hour say that they [no] longer expect energy use to actually drop during the hour, but instead see it as a way for people to show their commitment to reducing energy use and taking action beyond the hour.

It’s absolutely every person’s right to decide if they want to conserve energy for whatever reason; they are free to sit in the dark as long as they want. However, it should not be their right to impose their beliefs or opinions on others. And that is what is at the heart of the environmentalist movement. While many participants in Earth Hour sincerely want a cleaner environment — a desire most of us share — the environmentalist movement whether implicitly or explicitly seeks to clamp down on human progress by reducing energy consumption whether through regulation and taxation. They want to make fossil fuels, which they see as dirty, more expensive to encourage the use of renewable “greener” energies.

Despite any good intentions, the ultimate result of environmentalist policies is not a healthier, cleaner environment. Instead we will see a population that is sicker and poorer. The only way we achieve technology that is “greener” is by building on older “dirtier” technology. As we make it harder and more expensive for those in the business of creating new technologies, all we do is slow progress and make it that much longer to reach more environmentally friendly solutions.

March 4, 2013

Solar power in a dark German winter

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, Germany — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:44

The German government is having to pay a lot of money in subsidies to solar power generators, but is also having to scramble to buy power from other European sources as the solar output is falling far below current demands:

The Baedeker travel guide is now available in an environmentally-friendly version. The 200-page book, entitled “Germany – Discover Renewable Energy,” lists the sights of the solar age: the solar café in Kirchzarten, the solar golf course in Bad Saulgau, the light tower in Solingen and the “Alster Sun” in Hamburg, possibly the largest solar boat in the world.

The only thing that’s missing at the moment is sunshine. For weeks now, the 1.1 million solar power systems in Germany have generated almost no electricity. The days are short, the weather is bad and the sky is overcast.

As is so often the case in winter, all solar panels more or less stopped generating electricity at the same time. To avert power shortages, Germany currently has to import large amounts of electricity generated at nuclear power plants in France and the Czech Republic. To offset the temporary loss of solar power, grid operator Tennet resorted to an emergency backup plan, powering up an old oil-fired plant in the Austrian city of Graz.

Solar energy has gone from being the great white hope, to an impediment, to a reliable energy supply. Solar farm operators and homeowners with solar panels on their roofs collected more than €8 billion ($10.2 billion) in subsidies in 2011, but the electricity they generated made up only about 3 percent of the total power supply, and that at unpredictable times.

February 4, 2013

CBS Sports fumbles during SuperBowl blackout

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

In the New York Daily News, Bob Raissman asks why CBS didn’t bother to do any actual “journalism” about the blackout:

The fans inside the Superdome were not the only ones left in the dark when half the building’s power went out in the third quarter of Super Bowl XLVII Sunday night. Viewers were left with unanswered questions as CBS Sports’ sideline reporters, and the rest of the cast, failed to go into a reporting mode.

There was no outrage, no questioning how a thing like this could happen on the NFL’s biggest night of the year.

At a time when they should have been aggressively gathering news, CBS’ crew was satisfied with the crumbs the NFL dropped on them. And they swallowed the scraps gladly. Not once during the 34-minute delay did a representative of the National Football League appear on camera to attempt to explain what caused half the Superdome to lose power. Why should they? No one from CBS put any pressure on them.

[. . .]

Think about it. CBS pays billions for the right to air NFL games. Much of that dough is shelled out to secure rights to the Super Bowl. So, on the big night, there is a major screwup and the NFL won’t put someone on the air — and CBS won’t push the league — to try to explain what’s going on? That’s mind-boggling.

But not quite as wacked as CBS’ laid-back approach to reporting this story, which will go down as one of the more unusual moments in Super Bowl history. All the players were on the field, waiting, stretching. Why not take a camera and microphone on the sidelines for an interview? If they blow you off, fine — at least viewers would have something worth watching.

January 5, 2013

LA terminates luxury option for electric car owners

Filed under: Environment, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:43

It’s telling that one of the folks quoted in this article clearly identified the free parking at the airport as a primary reason for buying an electric vehicle:

On a recent morning, Jack Luu parked his plug-in Toyota Prius in one of the most expensive lots at Los Angeles International Airport before flying off to a film shoot in Canada. The lot, where Mr. Luu leaves his car as many as 10 times a month for business trips, normally charges $30 a day.

But when Mr. Luu returned home three weeks later, he drove out, as usual, without paying a dime.

“That was a huge reason why I bought the car in the first place,” says the 35-year-old Santa Monica, Calif., postproduction company executive, whose car qualifies for free parking for up to a month at a time in two of LAX’s most convenient—and costly—short-term lots.

Other than that, he says his ride is “expensive, underpowered and not really all that green,” because it can run just 12 miles on electricity before switching to gas.

For years, LAX has offered electric-vehicle owners one of the most generous incentives of its kind in the country: free parking for 30 days in two of its terminal lots, which contain, altogether, 38 charging stations. The rule was meant to encourage people to buy greener cars, but lately it has turned the lots into a mob scene, with some electric-vehicle drivers circling the stations desperately for electricity or running extension cords while others hog the charging spaces for weeks at a time.

October 30, 2012

Beginning to assess the damage

Filed under: USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

ESR posts a “we’re fine” report on Google+ and then points out the damage to New York City’s power grid may be incredibly expensive and difficult to repair quickly:

Reporting from a diner in Paoli, PA, near 40°02′27″N 75°29′24″W.

Power went out in Malvern about 2AM this morning. After sleep, we have fled to where there is power and light and steak and eggs.

It feels like aftermath. The NOAA seems to no longer be issuing track updates and the storm track has disappeared from the Google crisis map, suggesting that the anticipated conversion to a large but normally (un)structured nor’easter has completed.

This area got off lightly, especially compared to the ration of apocalypse-now the storm handed New York City. Exploding high-power transformers are very bad news — they tell us that all that tunnel flooding seriously damaged the downtown end of the Manhatten power grid. That kind of equipment is extremely expensive and difficult to replace, and the halogen compounds they use as insulators are hazmats when they get loose. The prompt repair costs are going to be a large fraction of a billion dollars.

But that isn’t the worst of it. Considering that this will have have paralyzed the largest node in the international financial system for some time, downstream economic losses could easily crack a trillion dollars. The impact will be global and manifest as higher prices for everything with cross-border supply chains, rippling all the way down to Third-World farmers buying fertilizer.

Update: In almost record-setting time, here’s the first example of the Broken Window Fallacy to make it past the editors:

Disasters can give the ailing construction sector a boost, and unleash smart reinvestment that actually improves stricken areas and the lives of those that survive intact. Ultimately, Americans, as they always seem to do, will emerge stronger in the wake of disaster and rebuild better-making a brighter future in the face of tragedy.

Sandy is unusual storm and complex to gauge. Coming late in the season and combining with cold fronts to the west and north, it is really a post-tropical cyclone and has the potential to deliver epic destruction. However, coming so soon after Irene in August 2011, the level of anticipation and preparedness demonstrated by federal and state officials is commendable and should mitigate some losses-especially loss of life.

[. . .]

However, rebuilding after Sandy, especially in an economy with high unemployment and underused resources in the construction industry, will unleash at least $15-$20 billion in new direct private spending — likely more as many folks rebuild larger than before, and the capital stock that emerges will prove more economically useful and productive.

August 12, 2012

The (long awaited) growth in Indian manufacturing

Filed under: Business, Germany, History, India, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

The Economist on the relatively slow development of India’s manufacturing sector:

If India is to become “the next China” — a manufacturing powerhouse — it is taking its time about it. “We have to industrialise India, and as rapidly as possible,” said the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1951. Politicians have tried everything since, including Soviet-style planning. But India seems to prefer growing crops and selling services to making things you can drop on your foot.

Manufacturing is still just 15% of output (see chart), far below Asian norms. India needs a big manufacturing base. No major country has grown rich without one and nothing else is likely to absorb the labour of the 250m youngsters set to reach working age in the next 15 years. But it can seem a remote prospect. In July power cuts plunged an area in which over 600m people live into darkness, reminding investors that India’s infrastructure is not wholly reliable. And workers boiled over at a car factory run by Maruti Suzuki. Almost 100 people were injured and the plant was torched. The charred body of a human-resources chief was found in the ashes.

Yet not all is farce and tragedy. Take Pune in west India, a booming industrial hub that has won the steely hearts of Germany’s car firms. Inside a $700m Volkswagen plant on the city’s outskirts, laser-wielding robots test car frames’ dimensions and a giant conveyor belt slips by, with sprung-wood surfaces to protect workers’ knees. It is “probably the cheapest factory we have worldwide”, says John Chacko, VW’s boss in India. In time it could become an export hub. Nearby, in the distance it takes a Polo to get to 60mph, is a plant owned by Mercedes-Benz.

The initial demand for a domestic manufacturing base was more political than economic: it would serve to reinforce the newly won independence of India by showing that India could make its own goods rather than importing from the UK or other major manufacturing nations. It was also economic, in that it would provide relatively high-paying jobs for India’s rapidly urbanizing population.

Ironically, now that the manufacturing sector seems to be on the upswing, the one thing it isn’t going to do for India is provide lots and lots of jobs: as with the rest of the world, manufacturing “things” is being done with fewer workers every year (even when the total output increases, fewer workers are needed to produce that output).

August 6, 2012

India’s blackouts are a sign that reform is desperately needed

Filed under: Economics, India — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

The Economist on the massive blackouts in India recently:

FOR an aspiring economic superpower, there can be few more chastening events than electricity cuts as massive as those that struck northern and eastern India this week. An area (including the capital, Delhi) in which more than 600m people live faced blackouts over two days. Infrastructure, from traffic lights to trains, stopped working. Hospitals, sanitation plants and offices ground to a halt. Airports and factories had to rely on backup generators, often fuelled by truckloads of diesel.

The impact on India’s economy goes far beyond lost output. The blackout will badly damage the country’s reputation, and highlights the rotten infrastructure that is hobbling its efforts to catch up with China.

[. . .]

At one end, not enough cheap coal is being dug up and gasfields are sputtering. At the other, the national transmission grid needs investment. Meanwhile the “last mile” distribution companies, largely state-owned, that buy power and deliver it to homes and firms, are financial zombies. Much of their power is pinched or given away free. Local politicians put pressure on them to keep tariffs low, which leads to huge losses. Squeezed between a shortage of fuel and end-customers who are nearly bust, those private generating firms are now cutting back on vital long-term investment in new plants.

[. . .]

The solution is to cut graft, tackle vested interests and allow markets to work better. The coal monopoly needs to be broken up and local distribution firms privatised. Yet despite the looming crisis, for a decade the government has shirked doing what is clearly necessary, just as it has failed to implement key tax reforms, cut public borrowing or open the retail sector to competition. It has allowed corruption and red tape to damage other vital industries, such as telecoms.

July 7, 2012

Deregulating a “natural monopoly”

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Arnold Kling is a Pepco customer. Pepco is one of the regulated electricity providers in Washington DC and surrounding area. He suggests that there may be a better way to deliver electricity to customers:

A recent storm in the Washington, D.C. area left many households without power for days. Customers served by one company, Pepco, appeared to suffer the worst. Pepco had the slowest rate of power restoration of all the area’s electricity suppliers.

As an economist and a Pepco customer, I am concerned by two factors that insulate Pepco from facing market discipline concerning reliability. The first is that Pepco is a regulated monopoly. The second is that there is no price indicating the benefits of reliability.

The fact that Pepco is a monopoly means that its incentive to improve its operations is limited. Regulators may cajole and threaten, but ultimately Pepco is like an employee with tenure — no matter how badly it performs, it can never be fired.

The fact that there is no market price for reliability makes matters even worse. The amount that Pepco invests in ensuring reliable provision of electricity does not have to bear any relationship whatsoever to the value that consumers place on reliability.

Update: Oops, forgot the hat-tip:

June 16, 2012

James Lovelock interviewed in the Guardian

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:28

James Lovelock, who is perhaps best known for his “Gaia” theory, gives a somewhat surprising interview to the Guardian:

“Adapt and survive,” he says, when asked why he has decided to move. After more than three decades living amid acres of trees he planted himself by hand, he and his wife Sandy have decided to downsize and move to an old lifeguard’s cottage by the beach in Dorset. “I’m not worried about sea-level rises,” he laughs. “At worst, I think it will be 2ft a century.”

Given that Lovelock predicted in 2006 that by this century’s end “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable”, this new laissez-faire attitude to our environmental fate smells and sounds like of a screeching handbrake turn.

Indeed, earlier this year he admitted to MSNBC in an interview reported around the world with somewhat mocking headlines along the lines of “Doom-monger recants”, that he had been “extrapolating too far” in reaching such a conclusion and had made a “mistake” in claiming to know with such certainty what will happen to the climate.

[. . .]

Having already upset many environmentalists — for whom he is something of a guru — with his long-time support for nuclear power and his hatred of wind power (he has a picture of a wind turbine on the wall of his study to remind him how “ugly and useless they are”), he is now coming out in favour of “fracking”, the controversial technique for extracting natural gas from the ground. He argues that, while not perfect, it produces far less CO2 than burning coal: “Gas is almost a give-away in the US at the moment. They’ve gone for fracking in a big way. Let’s be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.”

Lovelock says the political fallout from the Fukushima disaster in Japan last year means that the chances of a surge in nuclear power generation are dramatically reduced. “The fear of nuclear is too great after Fukushima and the cost of building plants is very expensive and impractical. And it takes a long time to get them running. It is very obvious in America that fracking took almost no time to get going. There’s only a finite amount of it [in the UK] so before it runs out, we should really be thinking sensibly about what to do next. We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. Fracking buys us some time, and we can learn to adapt.”

The reaction in Germany to Fukushima — which announced within weeks of the disaster that it was to shut down all its nuclear power plants by 2022 — particularly infuriates Lovelock: “Germany is a great country and has always been a natural leader of Europe, and so many great ideas, music, art, etc, come out of it, but they have this fatal flaw that they always fall for an ideologue, and Europe has suffered intensely from the last two episodes of that. It looks to me as if the green ideas they have picked up now could be just as damaging. They are burning lignite now to try to make up for switching off nuclear. They call themselves green, but to me this is utter madness.”

Nestled deep into an armchair, Lovelock brushes a biscuit crumb from his lips, and lowers his cup of tea on to the table: “I’m neither strongly left nor right, but I detest the Liberal Democrats.”

[. . .]

Lovelock does not miss a chance to criticise the green movement that has long paid heed to his views. “It’s just the way the humans are that if there’s a cause of some sort, a religion starts forming around it. It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion. I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use. The greens use guilt. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting CO2 in the air.”

May 23, 2012

British government energy policies are “befuddled and beset by lobbyists”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:50

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian:

Anyone who claims to understand energy policy is either mad or subsidised. Last week I wrote that politics is seldom rational. It is more often based on intuition and tribal prejudice. This week we have a thundering example: the government’s new policy on nuclear energy.

Do not read on if you want a conclusion on this subject. For years I have read papers, books, surveys and news stories, and am little wiser. I trust to science and am ready to believe there is some great mathematician, some Fermat’s last theorem, who can write an equation showing where energy policy should turn. I have never met him.

The equation would start with the current market price of coal, gas, oil, nuclear and so-called “renewables”. That would give simple primacy to coal and gas. The equation would then factor in such variables as security of supply, which — being imponderable — can be argued from commercial interest and prejudice. Then it would have to take account of global warming and the virtue of lower carbon emissions. At this point the demons enter.

We must consider CO2 reduction through substituting gas for coal, carbon capture, nuclear investment, biomass, wind, wave, solar and tidal generation. We must consider the application of fiscal policy to gas and petrol use, to energy efficiency and house insulation. Each has a quantity attached to it and each a fanatical lobby drooling for subsidies. As for achieving a remotely significant degree of global cooling, that requires world diplomacy — which has, as yet, proved wholly elusive.

Britain’s contribution to cooling can only be so infinitesimal as to be little more than gesture politics, yet it is a gesture that is massively expensive. Meeting the current EU renewables directive, largely from wind, would cost some £15bn a year, or £670 a household, and involve the spoliation of swaths of upland, countryside and coast. It is calculated to save a mere 0.2% of global emissions, with negligible impact on the Earth’s sea level.

April 19, 2012

“Ontario is on track to have the highest electricity prices … in North America”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

Scott Stinson explains why Ontario consumers are facing huge price hikes for electricity over the next 18 months:

It’s no secret that Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals have placed a huge bet on growing a green-energy sector by subsidizing the production of renewable energy. Although energy bills have been steadily rising since the party took power in 2003 — the average cost of a kilowatt of electricity was more than 30% higher last year than it was five years ago — the Liberals have somewhat masked this fact by handing a 10% rebate back to consumers with the euphemistically named Clean Energy Benefit, which also happens to utterly contradict the conservation incentive that should be part of a switch to a greener grid.

Electricity costs, though, are set to spike.

“Ontario’s power system is fuelled by consumers to the tune of about $16-billion a year,” says Tom Adams, an energy consultant who has written extensively on electricity and environmental issues. “That number is headed for $23-billion or $24-billion soon, by 2016,” he says in an interview.

[. . .]

Mr. Adams notes that when the Green Energy Act, with its guarantees of above-market rates for wind and solar electricity known as feed-in-tariffs (FIT), was introduced in 2009, the Liberals said electricity costs would only be impacted by about 1% annually. We now know that rates for consumers are rising by 9% a year. “The government says about half of that is due to Green Energy, but if they were being honest it would be more than that,” Mr. Adams says.

The coming increases, meanwhile, which can partly be attributed to locked-in contracts for renewable energy, are also a result of a host of other factors, from new generation capacity being introduced to phase-out costs of existing facilities to new transmission capacity being added to the energy grid.

March 31, 2012

Ross McKitrick: Earth Hour, a dissent

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:26

I don’t observe Earth Hour, and Ross McKitrick explains some of the reasons far more eloquently than I can:

In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour.

Here is my response.

I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.

Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.

Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water.

Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases.

Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.

The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity.

Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity.

People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.

Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering, our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry and the power supply.

If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations.

No thanks.

I like visiting nature but I don’t want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.

Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics
University of Guelph

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