[Reader-list] Earth hour: Green stupidity/Romanticist aesthetics

[Ravi Agarwal]

Dear Supreet,

While I appreciate your sentiment that one off, and token gestures may
amount to very little, even they claim to serve a laudable purpose, my
difficulty may be  different that yours. I think that thinking of mother
earth and nature as a flat unmediated commodity, without taking into account
its social and economic politics, leads us to believe that we are only
consumers of 'nature' and do not have a 'political' relationship with it.
That we can equally participate in climate change and turn the tide without
taking responsibility of our differential consumption patterns of energy. I
thing that like all 'soundbites' this too makes the issue simpler that what
it is. It seems the only way we can understand things now is like
'consumers,' and the enent of turning off electricity is in that approach.
Meta soundbites!

As an aside,  electricity is not generated and put out to be consumed.
Generation is also demand dependent, since it 'loads' the generation
system. In India we are deficient and saving energy actually saves it, since
it other systems needing energy can draw on it.

best
ravi agarwal

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 7:52 AM, s|s <supreet.sethi at gmail.com> wrote:

> The green propaganda has been successful. In fact, it has been so
> successful, that there is no need for offering facts for getting
> certain segment of society to act upon its 'dictate'.
>
> I came to know about Earth hour next day when large black blob on
> front-page in a popular news-paper announced that 600 MW electricity
> was saved because people switched off their lights and used candles
> instead.
>
> While I congratulate all who were part of this experiment for being
> sensitive towards 'mother earth'. I must add, it just makes you worst
> offenders in robbing its resources by being ludicrously un-informed.
>
> The power that was not consumed, apparently was saved. Important
> question is where? Did somebody hire batteries to be charged with the
> 'saved' power. Because frankly any power which has not being consumed
> in a power grid is wasted. Was NTPC or other power companies informed
> that you need to produce less power during this time?
>
> On consumption part of the business, using candles is frankly more
> polluting than consuming power from grid by order of four times, even
> if power is produced using coal. This atleast makes people who
> participated in 'Earth hour' worst offenders by not using up
> electricity that has already been produced and using candles which
> requires transport by trucks, lorries compared to relatively efficient
> grids.
>
> Turning off unnecessary switches on day to day is all that is required.
>
>
> Supreet
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