General Music Chat

Landmarks, cities worldwide unplug for Earth Hour (AP)

AP - Europe's best known landmarks — including the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and Rome's Colosseum — fell dark Saturday, following Sydney's Opera House and Beijing's Forbidden City in joining a global climate change protest, as lights were switched off across the world to mark the Earth Hour event.

Probably took more KwH to put everything back on line than they saved.
Turn it off forever or just STFU. Your not fooling anyone.

I turned ON all my lights in protest of the hoax

If it were air conditioners you might be right... but lightbulbs don't take extra electricity to turn them back on.

I'm sure they did little to save electricity by the move, but they did a lot to bring awareness to the world about the topic.

Y'know, maybe oil and coal were just fine back when you had to travel a mile to find a neighbor. In this day and age though we have to find alternative sources to power our lives. We're poisoning our own nest.

Here in Alabama we have rich coal deposits, and several coal fired, steam generators to provide electricity. Too bad I guess that the burning coal is depositing rising levels of mercury in our fresh water fish around here.

We're "advised" that eating fresh fish more than once a week could cause birth defects in our unborn child due to mercury buildup.

But I suppose we should all scoff and continue to piss in our food bowl, because these fools want to bring awareness to that and other detrimental effects of our stupidity and refusal to acknowledge that wasteful use and indiscriminate production of electricity is ruining our environment.

I'm not saying its going to destroy the world... world will keep on spinning thru space with our decaying corpses on it...
But if we want to enjoy the ride, we might want to get a bit smarter about how we do things.

DEWY, why are you trying to talk some sense?
I like people that use their brains. I didn't realise you were that smart.

Oddly my old boss many years ago did just that. Went around turning the lights off, sometimes even when you were working
Everyone at that time told me that it cost more to turn it on than it did to leave on but I suppose like everything there is a threshold to that statement?

Silly displays of this sort don't deserve our acknowledgement. This is something that a middle school kid would suggest, & it means nothig in the grand scheme of things.

If it were air conditioners you might be right... but lightbulbs don't take extra electricity to turn them back on.

I'm sure they did little to save electricity by the move, but they did a lot to bring awareness to the world about the topic.

Y'know, maybe oil and coal were just fine back when you had to travel a mile to find a neighbor. In this day and age though we have to find alternative sources to power our lives. We're poisoning our own nest.

Here in Alabama we have rich coal deposits, and several coal fired, steam generators to provide electricity. Too bad I guess that the burning coal is depositing rising levels of mercury in our fresh water fish around here.

We're "advised" that eating fresh fish more than once a week could cause birth defects in our unborn child due to mercury buildup.

But I suppose we should all scoff and continue to piss in our food bowl, because these fools want to bring awareness to that and other detrimental effects of our stupidity and refusal to acknowledge that wasteful use and indiscriminate production of electricity is ruining our environment.

I'm not saying its going to destroy the world... world will keep on spinning thru space with our decaying corpses on it...
But if we want to enjoy the ride, we might want to get a bit smarter about how we do things.

For once on a non musical topic I actually agree with you sir.

But this act I feel was more of the same.
Just a show.
To raise awareness ?? Perhaps ?
But if they really meant it. They'd leave the damn light off, cut the time in half or something.
I am all about saving energy. I am an outdoors-man and love the natural world. ( just ask my kids about how many times I've told em to turn off the damn light when not in a room. LOL )

What I decry is the posturing.
A mansion dweller flys a private jet to Europe so he can publicly denounce me for owning a jeep instead of riding a bicycle.

WTF is that all about ??

Is it raising awareness or posturing ??
Is my questioning the motives really scoffing ?


( Best I remember, incandescent lights do surge to heat the filament and florescent require a surge through ballast and starter in order to initiate the excitement of the gas molecules, but to be honest my electrical education was light years ago )

Last year sometime, the media made a big deal out of some well-meaning HS students, who went out on the interstate highway, blocked both lanes of traffic, & drove the speed limit, all day, in both directions, in some southern state. I forget which one. They failed to mention the road rage this incurred, or how these stooges put themselves at risk for some nut job speeding around them on the shoulder. This kind of stupid stuff is often encouraged by some dumbass but well-meaning fool who thinks he will sway public opinion, or force better habits on us regular folk.

It invariably fails.

Incandescent's waste a LOT of energy by converting it to heat... the initial electricity loss heating the filament isn't much when compared to what it loses over the next hour of operation due to heat conversion... but agreed, its more waste.

Fluorescent's and other Ballast types loose a bit of energy when stepping the voltage up in the ballast. That's how they work... taking 120v and transforming it to a much higher voltage to excite rarer gasses inside the bulb. The savings over the lower heat to energy conversion makes up for the minimal losses during the voltage "step up".

I leave my computers on all of the time... all 12 or so that I have scattered across the county... by my math its around $.30 a day (per puter). But nearly every hardware failure I have had was during a cold start. I "Pay" for dependable service thru this "waste"... and look elsewhere to compensate.

Activists like Gore are easy targets... they try to affect our mindset, but will of course in the process draw a lot of heat from critics. Gore has less issue with you than the Jeep Corp that continued to wallow in low efficiency standards despite what a consumer "demands". You and Gore would have both been very happy with a 40 mpg jeep that didn't leak oil like a sieve after 100k miles. But Jeep didn't bother to improve over how many years of tech improvements?

I am disgusted by our capitalist system that will allow Mercury levels to rise in one of our state's GREAT resources... so some jackasses can run their xmas lights. We'll drag our feet in applying known needed scrubbers to the coal stacks to squeeze out a few more bucks.

I'm disgusted by factory farms... mountains of toxins that nature can't process quickly... so fat bastards can have a 20 pack of nuggets for the ride home.

I'm disgusted by Seadoo's screaming by when me and my family goto the local lake. That is a family tradition for us, or used to be. Now they can't keep the "watercraft enthusiasts" out of the swimming areas, but since they pay more taxes... they get to keep screaming thru the swimming hole I cooled off in as a kid, while my kids are not allowed in the water.

Is my questioning the motives really scoffing ?
No... questioning motives and asking hard questions is part of the needed debate. Scoffing is pointing out Gore is a mansion Dweller and jaunts around in a private jet... and not point out as well how many acres of "carbon offsets" he has invested in, Or his new Solar roof, or the fact that his money has gone to kick start great projects across the world, while his profits goto... well great projects around the world.

He was born rich, and by our system, never had to do a damn thing in his entire life. Does he get any credit for going out and doing "stuff" he believed in anyway? Does he get any credit for doing all of this as a non profit... for everyone else's benefit... instead of screaming up and down my local lake on a seadoo?

He does from me.

As for you and I agreeing... I'm not surprised. Me, you, Craig, and some others are very close together on many topics. We could easily find common ground wherever we looked I am certain. Where friends disagree is where discussion begins. We disagree... but even then its in a well thought out way, with open minds that could actually see the argument from other positions.

DEWY, why are you trying to talk some sense?
I like people that use their brains. I didn't realise you were that smart.

Ohh, I got smarts, its WISDOM I have sought all of my life. Smarts got me into lots of trouble, not so proud of it... been a heavy burden to bear. Just between me and you... every time I have made a mistake... I mentally kicked myself, because I knew it was wrong when I did it. Just lazy, or indulgent... whatever the case, I have outsmarted myself more times that I have been able to count. This "smart fellow" has be plenty foolish, so thanks, but I take no pride in intelligence with my slim capacity for wisdom. I know what I know because of an insatiable thirst to know... little good it generally does me.

But my friends and family find me useful... got to count for something I suppose.

I scream around the lake in my ... canoe.

I wondered why my desk lamp was suddenly brighter..lol

It's about raising awareness.

What's so wrong about that?

Nothing necessarily wrong with this action,cuzitdoesn't affect other ppl much. The thing on the highway was wrong, imho.

I don't think this sorta thing "raises anyone's awareness," though. Do you?

it certainly hasn't changed anything in my life...

Raising awareness = pretend to do something PC for an hour, then back to the same old shyt.

That's whats wrong with it.

It's a lie.

Maybe we should all sit around and do NOTHING. We shouldn't TOUCH anything, except eat a few plants to just keep us alive. Don't make anything (use up precious resources), don't burn anythng (waste precious energy), keep totally silent (emit harmful sound waves), hopefully fart less (emit harmful CO 2 gases), basically just VEGETATE. This way we leave almost no carbon footprint and thus save the Earth...