Earth day rant

Yesterday, as most of you know, was Earth day when cities across the world switched off their lights from 8:30 to 9:30 pm. Now, I find this a great way to raise awareness on the topic of global warming, a very genuine cause. However, I think that it is time to take action rather than raise awareness.

Let us not kid ourselves here. The problem on hand is huge. We need to put all our collective efforts and thoughts on trying to solve it that raising awareness. Now, do not try to tell me that we did something by switching off the lights for an hour. Switching off the lights for an hour reduced the energy you used but it did not reduce the energy produced by the electric company which was wasted anyways since the electricity cannot be stored. Therefore, the amount of carbon that was released was not any less than what would have been released otherwise. What we need to do is reduce our overall energy expenditure (the part that is wasteful) so that companies reduce the electricity they burn. We need to work towards renewable energy sources. And we need to do it now.

I do realize that there is nothing new in what I am saying, but I do seriously believe that we need to get beyond the farce that is awareness and spend more time in coming up with an innovative solution. Maybe, if we do want to raise awareness, we need to decide that people switch off lights for one hour on the day corresponding to their first name (A=1, B=2.....) in every month. This way, we will reduce the cumulative energy used and maybe call on electric companies to reduce the energy they produce.

Ofcourse, this is not necessarily in the best interest of the economy because less electricity means less jobs. ;)

PS: The reason I am frustrated with awareness is that in our generation, we have been spending more time raising awareness on topics than solving them................look around you there are people walking to raise cancer awareness, switching off lights to raise awareness on global warming and wearing bands to raise AIDS awareness. The previous generation would build a hospital to treat cancer patients because a relative died.............did that help? Maybe not.................but atleast they did something.