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Kingston Beach -Tasmania

Earth Hour Contradiction

Phil Northeast
28 March 2009

According to today’s Mercury people all over the world are urged to turn off their lights for one hour to highlight the way they consume energy.

Unfortunately, this betrays the weakness of the fundamentalist environmental rhetoric, how the energy is produced. For many years Tasmania strived to build a network of power stations that produce little or no carbon dioxide, or any other waste products, as they generate electricity. They rely on the sun heating water which is then collected in high altitude storages and as it flows down to the sea it turns turbines to generate the power.  Therefore, reducing electricity consumption in Tasmania should not impact on climate change.

People in Tasmania should be encouraged to turn on their lights and flaunt their foresight in building a power system that does not contribute to climate change.

There is one problem with this argument, protest movements late in the last century made power stations with little or no carbon emissions politically unpopular. This movement gave Senator Bob Brown a political career based on this opposition to power plants with minimal carbon emissions.    

All the latest developments in Tasmania’s power generation mainly revolve around burning gas or coal to make up for the lost opportunities for hydro-electric power generation. In  a world needing to reduce the growth of carbon emissions the production of clean power should be celebrated and encouraged. So during Earth Hour think about where your electricity comes from.