How I Will Spend Earth Hour: In A Hot Tub, With All The Lights On, My Fridge Open, While Eating Baby Polar Bear

All my life I have been encouraged to 'become aware' or experienced events designed to 'raise awareness' of some cause or the other. In some cases, such as HIV/AIDS, it actually did raise awareness - there were a lot of false information about AIDS in the early '80s and attempts to educate the public did help, but I would argue that Magic Johnson announcing he had HIV did more for the cause than any seminar or poster. In other cases, raising awareness didn't work out that well - too many times I sat through a school assembly about racism, which always resulted in the message 'racism is bad'.

(I've always thought that the notion of us getting to know one other would cause more racism and bigotry than it would prevent any. After all, the more you get to know someone, the more reasons you find to dislike them.)

Usually when someone wants to 'raise awareness' what they really want is for you to agree with them and/or donate money to the cause. Earth Hour is one such event. Basically, cities across the world will dim the lights for an hour, to raise aware awareness of climate change.

I'm not sure what that means, really. Is there anyone who hasn't heard of climate change yet?

The true intention is for people to start thinking that the world is coming to an end because of climate change. And perhaps it is, though I have my doubts. Instead of saying that though, the organizers have to couch it in these post-60's terms so that it seems as if they are educating, not indoctrinating.

The Star has been a big supporter of Earth Hour, and has been running a series where they will ask 'celebrities' how they plan to spend Earth Hour. For the most part they have been dreadful, but this one particularly stands out for being vapid.

"I'm participating in Earth Hour in solidarity with Canadians and Africans. I support the idea, and I don't want to forget what life is like in the "dark continent." From space, Africa at night is unlit. With nearly one billion people, it has a sixth of the world's population, but uses only 4 per cent of the electricity."

Yes. Well. Right.

Africa only uses 4 per cent of the world's electricity because it doesn't have the economic nor technological infrastructure to use any more. I'm not sure what she's going on about here - if countries in Africa were to raise their quality of living to the same as the West, wouldn't that compound climate change? Deplete more natural resources? Melt more polar ice? Kill more baby polar bears?