Here's to 8759 unearthed hours

Celebrations can be so unkind. I try not to partake (parades excepted), so I have a tendency to miss them.

Except, you know, when they're shoved down your throat from all angles. Which is always.

There was Kindness Week a few weeks ago... I was unfortunately kind to people on each of the three days after it ended. Had I been more up-to-date with my newspapers, I would have realized my awkward timing and kept my kindness to myself. Apparently Ottawa-Centre MPP Yasir Naqvi wants to take Kindness Week provincewide, which is the kind of thing a back bench parliamentarian does to try to feel like he's doing something. At least a provincewide Kindness Week is fairly benign, unlike Naqvi's proposed SCAN legislation.

But the occasion for today's rant is of course Earth Hour, that one hour of the year where you pretend to care about the earth by turning off your lights. My blog entry on Earth Hour last year, titled For Every Light You Turn Off gets a lot of hits, thanks mostly to Italians and Germans searching Google Images for the associated graphic that I myself had located the same way in preparation of the post.

It's somewhat ironic that I post more about Earth Hour than I do about National Grouch Day, but I guess that just proves I'm not biased when it comes to non-celebration.

For a good rant against Earth Hour, I suggest reading this entry on the blog of Citizen editor Ken Gray. For assorted ramblings about Earth Hour, continue reading here.

Earth Day, in its simplest form, is--

Sorry, Earth Hour. My brain has a hard time acknowledging that people can hold an annual celebration in the span of an hour. I can barely get a blog entry written in that much time. Even though most people only celebrate it at 11am, November 11th is still called Remembrance (or Armistice, or Veteran's) Day. Now the 2003 blackout, that's the kind of thing we should be doing every year. That brought people away from their TVs and cell phones and into the streets communing with neighbours. (For reference, Earth Day is April 22nd.)

Anyway, Earth hour is an insane concept because it asks us to turn off our lights for one hour on a Saturday night once a year--something that nearly everyone does for many hours every other night of the year anyway. Then again, the idea started in Sydney, Australia, so maybe the lights there are normally on during the night because of the time difference...

This year, Ottawa City Hall made a big motherfucking poster for Earth Hour. Literally three stories tall:

And I'd be really surprised if the amount of energy saved by Ottawans' horoterrestrial delumination will balance out the amount of energy that went into making that damn thing.

But people say that Earth Hour, even though it's symbolic, inspires people to make real changes in their lives. Yeah, like changing their vote to the politician who promises the most smiles and rainbows.

It's a way to get people to feel smug about caring for the environment, and for those who don't care about the environment to get their annual lip service out of the way and feel equally smug. You can even drive to the coffeeshop and tell your friends about how great you are for having turned off your lights off at home while you're not there.

Another aside: you'll release a lot more CO2 emissions by burning candles than you ever will with lightbulbs, and those emissions are released right in your house, not at a power plant hundreds of kilometres away.

Considering how little of the household energy bill goes to lighting, does anyone really think that Earth Hour is responsible for recent reports that Ottawa's average electricity demand is going down? I'd also be interested to know the response when people are asked to cut energy use in order to feel good as compared to, say, being threatened with rolling brownouts.

There's a general shift in the public consciousness toward environmentalism and conservation, and it doesn't need a celebration to happen. It makes sense to reduce your energy consumption, and can save money, too, since energy use often has a direct cost factor somewhere up the line, and people are. People are making changes in their lives; Earth Hour is just a contrivance to let them talk about it. And talk is cheap.

Be it kindness, grouchiness, or energy consumption, if you want to change your habits, don't wait for a bloody holiday to do it.

- RG>

Save the world this Earth Hour

Last year, I spoke about the 8759 hours in the year that aren't Earth Hour--you know, that one time of year for people who consider a whole day too long to be an environmentalist?

Last night, however, I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep (you know, that time every single night when you turn off the lights for a whole bunch of hours?) when I got to worrying about Earth Hour.

You see, last year, I turned on all my lights and appliances during Earth Hour mainly to be a contrarian dick, and to distance myself from this superficial, contrived event for SUV-driving armchair environmentalists. But this year I might actually save the world by doing so, and you should too.

To complicate matters, I've been invited to an event that night, and that means that I'll either have to turn on all my appliances for the entire time I'm out of the house, or I'll have to inadvertently mark Earth Hour the same way as all the wannabes--by turning off my lights and appliances.

Either way, I'll be damned if I burn any candles. Do you know how wasteful those things are?

But the real reason I'm worried is that my traditional (well-illuminated) celebration of Earth Hour might actually be helping the environment.

You see, power generation isn't a linear thing. When the grid needs to pull more electricity than normal, you turn on more power plants. There are various plants that can be easily activated for peak use. After all, spikes in power consumption are literally an every day occurrence. Have a look at the near real-time Ontario Wholesale Electricity and Prices. It is these peak usage times that strain our electricity system, requiring electricity retailers to import power from other jurisdictions (often coal-fired plants from the US) at ridiculous prices.

The real problem for the electricity grid is when power consumption drops below the normal consumption. While there are plants that can be easily activated and deactivated for peak use, the majority of the power comes from base load power plants, which produce a generally consistent amount of power. Think nuclear plants, which can take days to turn on and off.

Weekends are not a peak usage time. So much so that when Hydro Ottawa introduces time-of-use billing, weekends (all 48 hours of every one) will be priced at the lowest pricing range.

Now, Earth Hour--which is held on a weekend--is only a recent phenomenon, but thankfully I chronicled it in 2009 and 2008. As its popularity grows, the risk of damage does too.

If enough people and greenwashed organizations actually cut their power usage at a time of low electricity demand, they run the risk of leaving the province with a significantly oversized supply of base-load power and no way to turn off the tap. In this type of circumstance, they have to burn it off and waste the electricity. In a doomsday scenario, it might actually cause damage to our power grid, but that's just wild speculation on my part.

Based on this, if I really wanted to be a dick, I would actually go along with the Horoterrestrial Deluminants to help demonstrate they're doing more harm than good.

But then, in the days of Glen Beck and Ann Coulter, if we're going to resort to wild speculation, we'd might as go all the way:

Maybe with the knowledge (er, 'knowledge') that this could do major damage to our power supply, turning off all my lights during Earth Hour at the behest of jingoistic governments and environmental groups might actually consist of conspiracy to commit terrorism!

If anything, it's my civic duty to leave my lights and electronics running during Earth Hour!

- RG>

For every light you turn off... (or how I spent my Earth Hour)

I don't know if you've heard about the latest fad called "Earth Hour". If you haven't, essentially it's a thing where regular people turn off all their lights for one hour of the year and pretend that they're granola-eating hippies.

I knew when I first heard about it that I didn't like it, and not just because Mayor O'Brien was supportive of it.

There is a Japanese saying: "Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare." As profound as this saying is, this Earth Hour event doesn't fit into either category. Earth Hour is more "action without action", and hence this post is deserving of the "yellowribbons" label (see "Support Motherhood and Apple Pie").

If you really cared about the environment, you'd make changes in your everyday habits (such as reducing your car use, eating less meat, living in a smaller and more energy-efficient home, etc.). Turning off your lights once a year at 8pm doesn't really mean very much if your TV, computers, and other appliances come right back on an hour later.

And if you really cared for the Earth, you'd give it more than just an hour.

I mean, shit: every night, most people do more than was accomplished in Earth Hour simply by turning off their lights and sleeping for six to eight hours!

Of course, as is reported in the Citizen, greenhouse gas emissions will probably not be reduced during Earth Hour, especially with many people burning candles. Even if they're more 'natural', candles put a lot more dirty shit into the air per unit of light than electric plants do. (Not that I care much for the GHG fad, either.)

So how did I spend my earth hour? Well, along these lines:



While all the suburbanites were sitting in their living rooms signing kumbayah and eating marshmallows, I turned on every light in my house, including the one in the stove. In fact, keeping with the theme of the image above, I ate three animals too!

Interestingly, when I was done cooking my "three animals" (two eggs and some strips of bacon--I hadn't had bacon in years. So tasty!), I turned off the stove, and my arm automatically reached for the stove light switch. I had forgotten that I was keeping my lights all on for the hour.

I guess energy conservation is just one of those pesky habits that dies hard.

- RG>

It's that hour again...

Well, it's time for my fourth annual Earth Hour-bashing post. As I've said in past years, I don't like to celebrate events that consider it special to turn the lights off for an hour; it's something I do for many hours every night. Twenty-four hours for Earth Day is enough in my books.

Some self-promoting environmentalists are promoting a candlelight vigil on Parliament Hill. Of course, candles are a much less efficient way to convert energy into light than electric lights are, and paraffin candles, being pure hydrocarbon, produce considerably more CO₂ emissions than whatever the hell was burned to power that light you turn off. I'll laugh if some people end up driving downtown to get to the vigil.

So then people use beeswax candles, which they claim are 'carbon neutral' because it's from honeybees instead of million-year-old dinosaur bones. Notwithstanding that honeybees are producing less and less each year, if you want to reduce your CO₂ emissions, you'd toss the beeswax candle into the trash. Once it gets to the landfill, its carbon will be stored and sequestered, which is much better than releasing it into the air by burning.

Then there are those who turn off the lights but still watch TV in the dark, because they're so superficially environmentalist that they can't even peel their arses off the couch for an hour to spend some time with the kids. Or there's the people who use battery-powered flash lights or unplug their laptops--apparently oblivious to the fact that they're simply using the electricity (converted and stored less efficiently in batteries) merely at a different time. These ones are the worst because they don't even get the theoretical message the Earth Hourers are trying to spread with this overhyped event. Does Jim Watson really need yet another event to pack into his agenda?

Speaking of the hype, I wouldn't be surprised if the energy "saved" by people turning off their lights is less than all the energy that goes into producing all the advertisements, posters, candles, publicity events, and three-fucking-storey-tall banners (below), plus the hot air from those of us pointing out how inane it is to celebrate a holiday that lasts only one hour. People are so disconnected from reality that the greenwashers have them convinced that electricity is the only form of energy that counts toward CO₂ emissions.

In previous years, Earth Hour has gone by so quickly I didn't even get a chance to turn on all my lights and appliances in protest. This year I've got plans outside the house in the evening, so instead of leaving my house dark as it normally would be when I'm not inside it, I'll have to leave my lights on all day to make sure they'll be on during Earth Hour.

I wouldn't want someone walking by to see a dark window and think I'm an Earth Hour sycophant.

- RG>

Here's to 1000 more years!

I've been using the moniker RealGrouchy online since at least 2003, and I didn't get the gmail account until 2005, but I consider the real RealGrouchy epoch to be when I started contributing to the interweboscape. This would be when I started contributing on Wikipedia, and that first contribution was on February 6, 2004, exactly eight years ago.

Eight years is scary. XKCD comic 647 scary:

Back then, Wikipedia only had a quarter million articles in English, whereas now it's approaching four million.

I first learned about Wikipedia from an article in the Ottawa Citizen the day before. The article talks about how user-generated content engenders community, and other fine stuff that made me think "wow, this is cool! I want to do this!"

I distinctly remember reading a similar article in the Citizen's Technology section a few months later that inspired me to start blogging, though I can't find it. I remember it talking about the "local blogging community", and I remember trying to find this "local blogging community". In what looks mighty foolish in retrospect, I did this by looking for other Blogger accounts that mentioned "Ottawa" in their location in the profile, and following their blogs. There was nothing particularly interesting.

I'd been writing Letters to the Editor in the Citizen for a few years, but over time the number of things printed in the paper that I wanted to write in and bitch about grew to a point where I knew most of them wouldn't be printed in order to leave space for others. Still wanting to share these opinions, I started my blog intending to publish my objections there instead.

I don't think that worked so well, because the first few years of my blog posts were mostly about how little I was doing. Some were specifically empty, because I didn't realize at the time that you could back-date posts (or maybe you couldn't yet... I remember tagging didn't come along for another couple of years) and I wanted to have a few entries I could write over for more reference-style posts (which I never bothered to do, and now "pages" lets you do that, which I haven't used either).

I know it sounds ironic, a person with the handle RealGrouchy going out in search of community, but there are rationalizations that I'll leave you to hypothesize. I'd picked the name some time prior as a handle for some online game, since RealGrouchy was one that was easily available (who would ever want to call themselves that!?).

Through it all, I have written primarily for myself, in what I can imagine is sometimes agonizing detail for my readers (but details I nevertheless want to record for my own reference). When I have written for others, it is primarily so they can see how wonderfully awesome I am. I have also written about other year-increment milestones, such as my McDonald's Fiveniversary (still going strong), and my annual holiday posts on topics like Earth Hour and National Grouch Day.

I've gotten a lot more busy in meatspace, doing things that I prefer to keep separate from here. But around me has grown a local blogging community, and some weeks I write more in the comments of others' blogs than I do in posts on my own. The persona of RealGrouchy grew, largely in the few years I spent on the XKCD forums, starting as user number 48 on the forums, becoming a moderator, and gaining celebrity—and, following my retirement, legendary—status on a site that has had nearly 300,000 user registrations.

But the more things change, the more things stay the same: I don't write so much about local issues as I'd originally planned, and instead write about stuff I've done or made with little reference to the outside world. I do still bitch about stuff, though I've developed a more subtle way of doing it. Not to mention more socially productive ways. I've also thought up many large projects that I never finished, and some I never even started.

I'm proud that I did all this—with a couple rare exceptions that I try not to acknowledge—anonymously. I wanted to link to a blog post picking apart Ken Gray's assault on anonymous bloggers, but I see that I never finished and published it. The gist of it is that he's a bigger coward despite using his real name than I am because I use a pseudonym. I've accomplished all this, made friends (many of whom I've subsequently met), been appointed to positions of power, and earned respect for my opinions, all without most of those people knowing what my name is. They know who I am, insofar as I present myself as RealGrouchy, and the identity of RealGrouchy is as strong as if I'd used my own name (and perhaps even stronger).

I knew from the start that I wanted to be anonymous. I didn't have any particular reason to do so at the time, but I knew that if a good reason were to come along, I'd be unable to put the cat back in the bag. However, it has worked well. It is great at making you think twice before putting something in writing, because you have to think about whether a particular detail will give you away, or if you'll be unable to say something with your real name after you say it with the pseudonym. The challenge of walking this line can be fun.

At the same time that writing under a pseudonym helps with restraint, it is also liberating, because I can say things that would be out of character for me, but are entirely in character for RealGrouchy. There are plenty of people who know RealGrouchy and have met the man behind him (and I thank them for keeping them separate). But for others, when you write as "RealGrouchy," they expect you to sound angry, and don't react as harshly when you are. After enough correspondence that people get to know RealGrouchy, it's nice to hear people say "you're not all that grouchy after all," because generally, mentally healthy people aren't all that grouchy.

So there you have it. Eight years of RealGrouchy. Here's to the next binary millenium!

- RG>