Drawing a Green Line through Earth Hour

How did you spend Earth Hour this year?  If you missed it, I am not surprised since most of the planet did too. 

Earth Hour is a great example of "a flurry of awareness building misconstrued as actual progress". 

Normally I stick to finance and economics but today I am going to play the role of electrical engineer to educate you about the finance and economics of saving electricity.

First, if you want to save electricity to save household expenses then you should do it.   However, don't think that your saving electricity is doing anything to save the planet.

Fact #1)  When electricity is generated and not consumed it is lost.  So when you turn out the light you are saving household expense but not saving electricity.  It is important to speak correctly.

Fact #2)  It is possible to store unconsumed electricity for short periods of time but in many cases the economics don't justify it.  Generally speaking, energy storage is economical when the marginal cost of electricity varies more than the costs of storing and retrieving the energy plus the price of energy lost in the process.  Also, electricity cannot be stored for long periods of time- there is gradual loss.

Fact #3)  Fuel-based power plants (i.e. coal, oil, gas, nuclear) can be more efficiently and easily operated at constant production levels.  So nobody is ratcheting down the generator when you turn off a light in your house.  It doesn't make sense to do so.

So when, everyone turns off the electrical consumption in their house for Earth Hour, the power plants keep producing anyway.  The electricity generated during Earth Hour is either lost or temporarily stored for some future peak demand point.  

Well done, people of earth.


Now let's draw that green line right through earth hour once and for all.

Power plants operate at their particular "green line" because that is the most efficient use of their design in terms of fuel consumption and reliability considerations.

Consumption changes must be massive and over a prolonged period of time to make the investment economics attractive to change the green line. 

One way to do this is to massively reduce the human population.  And this is why the environmentalists draw their green line this way...

Four Phases of the News

The consequence of 24 hour news requires that the audience carefully evaluate which "phase" of the news they are hearing.  For your entertainment and information, I submit the following:

PHASE 1:  FACT FREE (pervasive)
A journalist once told me, "I could do a lot of painstaking investigative research OR I could just report something someone tells me.  My job pays the same either way!".  Fact Free reporting looks like this:  CNN is reporting that other news outlets are saying, "______". You fill in the blank.  Fact free content is when the news is the news.  The only fact here is that someone is saying something.  Whether what they are saying is factual is not relevant.

PHASE 2: FACTUAL (rare)
This is when what is reported is a true fact- duly confirmed by independent, knowledgeable sources.  This rare event is difficult to detect because usually the fact is embedded inside someone's opinion about what you should think about the fact.  The fact is like the chewy chocolate surpise inside a Tootsie Pop- you have to do a lot of sucking and licking to get to the good part.

PHASE 3: FACTUAL SPECULATION (common)
This is when the time available for broadcast exceeds the time needed to report the facts.  News networks know that they cannot continously repeat the same facts over and over while retaining an audience.  So, they bring in "experts" who speculate on "what might happen next" given the facts at hand.  They speculate on the facts and consequently their speculation become the news. 

PHASE 4: SPECULATIVE FACTUALIZATION (undetectable)
You move to phase 4 when the speculation in phase 3 is repeated so many times that now it becomes accepted as fact even though it didn't actually happen.  By this time, all reality is lost, no one can separate fact from fiction.  Since no one can confirm a speculatized fact, the best a news agency can do is report on who is saying what.  This returns us back to PHASE 1.

If you've ever heard a news anchor refer to the "News Cycle".  This is what they really mean.