Editor’s Note: Earth Hour is the creation of the World Wildlife Fund. It is an event during which companies and individuals symbolically turn off their lights for an hour to virtue-signal their commitment to the environment, effectively wasting energy rather than conserving it, due to the nature of power production. This year, it was held on March 25, but you probably missed it…

We should spend Earth Hour in a salute to coal, oil, gas, and uranium.

It was coal that produced clean electric power which cleared the smog produced by dirty combustion and open fires in big cities like London and Pittsburgh. Much of the third world still suffers choking fumes and smog because they do not have clean electric power and burn green fuels like wood, cardboard, and cow dung for cooking and home heating.

It was coal that saved the forests being felled to fuel the steam engines for electricity generation and to produce charcoal for the first iron smelters.

It was coal that powered the light bulbs and saved the whales being slaughtered for whale oil lamps.

It was coal that produced the steel that replaced shingles on the roof, timber props in the mines, wooden fence posts on the farms, and the bark on the old bark hut.

And it is diesel and petrol that powers our farms, mines, and road transport.

In Australia today, coal still provides our most reliable electricity for lighting, cooking, heating, refrigeration, rail transport, and steel.

Without coal, oil, and gas much of the world would be back in the dark days of candles, wood stoves, chip heaters, open fires, smoky cities, hills bare of trees, and streets knee-deep in horse manure.

Coal is fossil sunshine as clean as the green plants it came from, and often less damaging to the environment than its green energy alternatives.

Earth Hour candles are green tokenism for rich status-seekers and nostalgic dreamers.

We should spend Earth Hour saluting the real heroes who, despite the abuse, still produce the coal, oil, gas, and uranium on which most people on Earth depend.

The Real Agenda of Earth Hour

‘We must make this place an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects – we must reclaim the roads and plowed lands, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers, and return to the wilderness millions and tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.’

– Dave Foreman, ‘Earth First’