Why should we care about Earth Hour when we have power cuts?
On Saturday night, an estimated seven thousand cities in more than 170 countries switched off their lights to mark Earth Hour. Organised by the World Wildlife Fund, Earth Hour involves almost a billion people worldwide, registering their protest against fossil fuels, and in support of carbon cuts and renewable energy.
Indian cities joined in too, though debate rages if the event actually achieves anything. Also in India, where power supply is erratic in most parts of the country, chances are high that before you switch off the lights yourself, the electricity department will do the job for you. We don’t have electricity. Why switch it off when it’s there, especially when it’s being there is a small daily miracle in itself. It’s like asking a starving man to say no to a sumptuous five-star spread.
There is an unmistakeable feel good factor to such days. Governments and corporations do not need to commit to any tangible measures; by shifting responsibility to the people, you absolve yourself of it.
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| Photo: Mail Today |
Energy experts like Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Sceptical Environmentalist, have argued that good eco intentions are no reason to extend ‘energy poverty.’ The developed world draws only 1% of its energy needs from wind and solar. So it’s a bit rich for them to expect Asia and Africa to shift to expensive renewables, while they continue to suck on fossils themselves. Lomborg writes: “Increasingly, the world’s rich nations insist that these people — the world’s poor — should have no new fossil fuel access. Foreign aid is increasingly tied to renewable energy projects such as building solar and wind power capacity, or tiny “off-grid” energy generators. This has a real cost — and it’s the world’s worst-off who pay.”
He points out another cost, a direct fallout of Earth Night. When a city voluntarily switches off lights, it lights candles. The ‘environment friendly’ candles lit by concerned citizens are a fossil fuel and burn a hundred times less efficiently than incandescent bulbs. The more candles you burn, the more CO2 you emit.
Affluent countries celebrating designer power cuts have to wrestle with a peculiarly first-world problem. What does one do during a self-inflicted power cut?
Capitalism provides options for the evening: paper lantern parties in public parks (with live music), dinners-in-the-dark in fancy restaurants, lighting sparklers, star-gazing events, yoga sessions and techno parties equipped with bicycle-powered DJ booths.
In India, where power cuts are a fact of daily life, we worship electricity. Its flow is unreliable and requires divine intervention. My Maths tutor in school who, every evening when I switched on the light, would fold his hands in prayer and close his eyes.
In a land where power comes and goes at will, we’ve long learned to hunker down and weather the dark storm. Forget about rural areas, anyone who’s grown up in an Indian city or town will have stories to tell. Of studying by kerosene lamp, constantly adjusting the wick, and cleaning the beautiful slender chimney of soot. Of envying and cursing neighbours who had loud polluting gensets—the genset being the most noisy and smelly form of our conspicuous consumption in the 1990s. And more recently—of waiting in small town bank queues during demonetisation, where the power goes several times in the course of a morning, and each time it goes, the computers shut down, and every time the system comes back on, it takes about five minutes, while the queue keeps getting more restless.
We’re used to the power going. Loadshedding. Power cuts. A loose connection in the pole outside your house. The mother of them all—the Northern grid failure, when all of North India is united in power-less misery.
As a child, power outages teach one to deal with disappointment. I missed several Sharjah cricket matches and Star Trek episodes on Sunday mornings. You waited a week, only to find that a power cut had aborted takeoff of the Starship Enterprise. Popular religious serials like Mahabharata and Ramayana were officially exempt from power cuts. Electricity was made available for the duration of broadcast, then switched off.
In cities like Allahabad, the power situation only stabilised in the last year of Akhlesh Yadav’s term. For more than a decade, day after day, locals woke up to no power till afternoon. An entire generation came of age in the meanwhile, attending classes in dingy classrooms.
Cities like Dehradun became capitals but little has changed. The electricity comes and goes, with no pattern whatsoever. In towns with bad street lighting, we actually welcome malls and brightly lit shop fronts because they light up the dark.
So while we care for the environment, turning the lights off just doesn’t have the same thrill of novelty it does in the first world. We have our survival mechanisms though. If it’s summer, and the power goes, we undress and fan ourselves with today’s paper. If it’s winter, we crawl under the quilt and go to sleep. For those who are working—the trick is to work long hours. The power back-up in office is always better than the one at home.