Darkness at the end of the tunnel

Remember when I said this:

The story of human history has been the drive to improve the human condition. Today's environmentalists want to worsen the human condition.

Well, guess what?

From the Sydney Opera House to Rome's Colosseum to San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, floodlit icons of civilization went dark Saturday for Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to highlight the threat of climate change.

The environmental group WWF urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes starting at 8 p.m. wherever they were.

The campaign began last year in Australia, and traveled this year from the South Pacific to Europe to North America in cadence with the setting of the sun.

"What's amazing is that it's transcending political boundaries and happening in places like China, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea," said Andy Ridley, executive director of Earth Hour. "It really seems to have resonated with anybody and everybody."

Earth Hour officials hoped 100 million people would turn off their nonessential lights and electronic goods for the hour. Electricity plants produce greenhouse gases that fuel climate change.

Landmarks such as San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and Chicago's Sears Tower went dark in the closing hours of Saturday's round-the-world event.

"It is not just about turning off the lights, it is about raising awareness," San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said. "Energy efficiency is low-hanging fruit. Energy efficiency is the easiest thing we can do" to reduce global warming.

In Chicago, lights on more than 200 downtown buildings were dimmed Saturday night, including the stripe of white light around the top of the John Hancock Center. The red-and-white marquee outside Wrigley Field also went dark.

"There's a widespread belief that somehow people in the United States don't understand that this is a problem that we're lazy and wedded to our lifestyles. (Earth Hour) demonstrates that that is wrong," Richard Moss, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the climate change vice president for WWF, said in Chicago on Saturday.

Please forgive my brief, blunt and colorful language here, but I have a message for Mr. Moss and his ilk: Fuck you.

Too colorful? Try Captain Ed:

Welcome to the fantasy of anthropogenic climate-change true believers. Their aspirations to make the world a little darker and colder came to life during Earth Hour, even while evidence mounts that their scientific hypotheses and models have serious flaws. Instead of handling legitimate scientific criticism as scientists, they have instead responded with obloquy and charges of heresy.

They do not want to find alternative energy sources that will fully replace what we have now. They want to reverse industrialization entirely, and they want top-down management of energy production to get it. They want a darker world, one in which candles replace light bulbs and the energy that runs the global economy — and has produced the best living standards in human history — gets rationed to satisfy the whims of statists and earth-worshipers.

Thaddeus Tremayne:

With each passing day I become more convinced that the 'green' movement is actually a millenarian psychosis; a mental and spiritual sickness borne, perhaps, from some degree of civilisational exhaustion. Not just a belief that the end of the world is nigh, but an active desire to bring it about. And soon. Ours is not the first age to witness such pandemics of madness but, in the Middle Ages at least, there was the excuse of a near-universal poverty. In such a state of interminable plight, despair may not be the wisest response but it is at least an understandable one.

But now we live in an age of near-universal prosperity and progress. Never before has our species enjoyed such security and such freedom from want. Yet this is clearly no defence against a recurrance of this psychological plague.

Some pubs are spending the evening without the lights on while many Australians are marking the occasion quietly in the darkness at home.

Life, laughter, love, food, drink, warmth, travel, communication, progress, a world full of unprecedented wonders and it's all too much for them. Better to sit in the darkness and curse the lighting of even a single candle.

'Stop the world, I want to get off' was the plaintive refrain of some Broadway comedy show I think. It could also be the motto for the greens, except that they want everybody off. Is that what they aspire to as they sit at home quietly in that seductive, undemanding cloak of blackness? To switch off civilisation and shuffle away into the perpetual tenebrosity dragging everyone else behind them?

The conditions are ripe for the spread of this insanity. Indeed, it is spreading now. How long will it be, I wonder, before some official body somewhere floats the idea of mandatory blackouts and curfews? "The voluntary approach" they will proclaim, "has not worked".

And what do we do in response? Laugh at them? Ignore them? Rage against them? What would work to innoculate the rest of our species? What combination or words or phrases could we use to dissipate and lay low a viral madness? I am, of course, familiar with the customary rebuttals. "We will win because we have MTV and Coca-Cola". But without the light there is no MTV, there is no Coca-Cola. What do we have then?

The lights are not yet going out all over the world. But I fear that I will see them do so in our lifetime.

Like I said earlier, these enviro-nazis deserve a rousing, "Fuck you."

Is such a phrase disrespectful? Absolutely. That is the point. Enviro-nazis have gotten so ridiculous that their every suggestion should be viewed with suspicion. it did not used to be that way. Environmentalists used to perform a valuable and necessary service, but they have become unreasonable, ridiculous and thuggish. All in the name of ...

Religion. That's right. Religion. That is what environmentalism has become. it is no longer based on science, but on faith.

Think of the "crisis" of anthropogenic global warming. Never mind that the Earth has been warming and colling in cycles for millions of years, and has even been tracked throughout human history. Remember how Norway was so warm and overpopulated that the Vikings had to invade England? How about the "Little Ice Age" that struck shortly thereafter in the 1100's or so.

And never mind that the sun is burning hotter, as it does, again in cycles. Or that other planets in the solar system, such as Mars, are showing evidence of warming, as Earth supposedly is.

It's warming, except when it's cooling. Hurricanes, lack of hurricanes. Icebergs getting smaller. Or bigger. It doesn't matter. It's all the fault of global warming.This is man's fault. One hundred years of industrialization as ruined the Earth. So we must do something about it:

The story of human history has been the drive to improve the human condition. Today's environmentalists want to worsen the human condition.

Energy prices are sky high right now because enviro-nazis fight every single attempt to increase that supply. Every. Single. Attempt. Can't drill for oil in the US. Can't build a new refinery. Can't mine for coal. Can get oil from oil sands, but enviro-nazis want that stopped, too, and fight efforts to retool refineries to handle the oil sands. Can't build new power plants, either. Ever.

And now they're even advocating an end to the use of electric lights. Go back to candles, they say. Brilliant. We have a safe and clean method of lighting and powering our life essentials and enviro-nazis want to take that away and replace it with individual fire hazards that take a lot of maintenance just to keep going.

Like I said earlier, my message to these people consists of two words: Fuck you.

It has gotten to the point with me that whenever they advocate something, I call for precisely the opposite, and generally I do precisely what they don't want me to do when I can. I have a stupid "Kno-Zone Action Day" in Indy? I do what I can to fill my gas tank and go to the drive-thru of a fast food place, all in the afternoon.

Want me to abide by "Earth Hour?" I'll try to use even more lights, even if I don't need to. Apparently, many in Australia have done exactly the same thing, so I bet I'm not alone.

Oil prices have skyrocketed because of these people. Natural gas prices have skyrocketed because of these people. The price of electricity has skyrocketed because of these people. It is hurting you and they don't care. In fact, they're happy about it.

The story of human history has been the drive to improve the human condition. Today's environmentalists want to worsen the human condition.

They want to impose their "religion" on you every bit as much as Usama bin Laden and the Islamists do.

Fight them. By thought. By word. By deed. Any legal way you can.

Civilization depends on it.

Human existence depends on it.