Celebrating “Human Achievement Hour” This Saturday

By Steve Buckstein

This Saturday you’ll have the opportunity to vote with your light switches. Either turn your lights off from 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm local time to “show your commitment to climate change action now” or turn your lights on to celebrate “human progress and our advancements in various fields of industry, including technology, medical, energy, and more.”

Turning your lights off makes you part of Earth Hour, a project of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Turning them on makes you a part of Human Achievement Hour 2015, a project of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

Since this isn’t a secret ballot, I’ll tell you that I’m voting for Human Achievement. As CEI notes, “Earth Hour does little to protect the environment” and “completely ignores how modern technology allows societies around the world to develop new and more sustainable practices that help humans be more eco-friendly and better conserve our natural resources.”

You don’t have to wait until Saturday to see what a large-scale expression of the “dark ages” versus human achievement looks like. Just check out any NASA nighttime photo of North and South Korea from space: “North Korea is almost completely dark compared to neighboring South Korea….The darkened land appears as if it were a patch of water joining the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan.”

North Koreans may simply be celebrating Earth Hour every hour of every day, but somehow I doubt it.

Steve Buckstein is founder and Senior Policy Analyst at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization.