Do as our eco saviours say, not as they do
OPINION
Caroline Overington
April 07, 2007
AS everybody knows, Sydney is the most vibrant and liveliest of Australian cities, so it's no surprise that dour environmentalists decided that Sydney - glorious, glittering Sydney - should be the first Australian city to suffer through Earth Hour. Earth Hour? Yes, it was a very bad idea, organised by a group known as the WWF. Not the wrestlers, apparently, but the World Wildlife Fund.
The idea was to get businesses in Sydney's central business district to turn off their lights for an hour. The organisers made it easy for them: they planned the event for last Saturday night, when most buildings were empty; and for March, when the weather was mild; and for 7.30pm, when shoppers had gone home.
The point, apparently, was to show how easy it might be to conserve some energy and to throw a metaphorical spotlight on the problem of climate change.
There was a great deal of excitement - a rival newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, gave up all semblance of unbiased analysis and printed itself on green paper the day before - but it fell quite flat: the great plunge into darkness never really happened. Street lights, security lights and other lights stayed on throughout Earth Hour; football was played under those giant, mosquito squatter-style mega-lights; concerts were held; cars stayed on the road; and so forth. Children could be heard complaining that their glow-sticks could barely be seen in what was gloom, as opposed to darkness.
Still, this newspaper decided to cover the event as if it were news, and on Sunday, when I came in to work, I was assigned to speak to WWF chief Greg Bourne about Earth Hour. Trouble is, try as I did all day, I couldn't find him. Why not? Because Bourne wasn't around. He was on an aeroplane.
Now, why should that matter? Well, Bourne knows this as well as anyone, but air travel is one of the worst things you can do if you believe you are trying to save the planet. On one calculation, about 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide a person are generated when flying return from Sydney to London. Another calculation is half that but, either way, it's a monstrous amount of the stuff, delivered right where the Earth is most vulnerable. Nicholas Stern - an economist from Britain who is the greens' pin-up boy - says flying by plane is the equivalent of beating the planet with a sledgehammer, or something like that.
Did that stop Bourne from boarding a long-haul flight to Singapore just hours after the great switch-off? Did it hell. He got on the plane because, apparently, it was urgently important to attend meetings in Asia with "international colleagues" who wanted to make Earth Hour a global event.
In the process, Bourne's plane dumped on the weary planet about a quarter of the C02 that was allegedly saved during Earth Hour. Organisers say 24 tonnes of C02 was saved, but in fact none was saved, just stored, in effect, for later use. And it takes a tonne or three a person to fly to Asia; on the way back, he'd dump the same amount. Now, this may be stating the obvious, but if Bourne is serious about climate change, he should not be flying. He could have been tele-conferencing. Nothing else makes sense. But, then, much about Earth Hour didn't make sense.
Consider this: the great switch-off was televised. No, really: Sky News and the BBC in London went live to the great power outage. Did that not strike anybody as, well, a touch absurd? How can people watch on TV an event involving a power switch-off? Also, the lights on the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge went out, as did lights on the Sydney Opera House. Sydneysiders, intrigued as to how this might look, promptly got into their cars and drove over the bridge to have a gander.
Similar things go on abroad all the time. Take Al Gore. He is the world's loudest climate-change warrior. He believes the Earth is a "ticking time bomb". Or does he? Dogged reporters in the US make the point that Gore can't really be concerned about the planet because he has three homes, including one in Nashville with 20 rooms, eight bathrooms, a guesthouse and a pool.
According to the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research, the monthly power bill for his Nashville spread is $US1359 ($1660). His gas bill is $US1080 a month. In other words, he spends almost $US30,000 a year on power. When these figures were made public recently, Gore complained that his home was an estate that included offices for himself and his wife, as well as a guesthouse, and that the bill included electricity for an elaborate security system.
Either the planet is coughing, spluttering, dying and in need of urgent action, or it isn't. Surely Gore can't mean: "Big homes, offices, private jets and computers for me; mud huts for the rest of you"?
Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is as bad. He has been preaching to the converted about climate change in California, urging people to cut consumption. But personally? He flies Gulfstream (small, private jets use fuel less efficiently than large ones). When asked about this apparent contradiction, Schwarzenegger said he had to fly private jets because he's a busy man and he needs flexibility in his timetable.
Then there are Australians such as Tony Wheeler, who founded Lonely Planet. One shudders to think how much C02 has been pumped into the atmosphere by backpackers and budget travellers at Wheeler's behest. He recently urged people to "fly less often and stay longer", as if unlimited holidays in sunny locales were in reach of everyone. Wheeler - visiting London on a business trip - said: "Absolutely. I'm the worst example of it."
It's hard to know what to say about such people except, perhaps: clean up your act.
overingtonc@theaustralian.com.au
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