Coal not candles should be the symbol of Earth Hour.
It was coal that produced clean electric power which cleared the smog produced by dirty combustion and open fires in big cities like London and Pittsburgh. Much of the third world still suffers choking fumes and smog because they do not have clean electric power and burn wood, cardboard, unwashed coal and cow dung for home heat.
It was coal that saved the forests being felled to fuel the first steam engines and produce charcoal for the first iron smelters.
It was coal that powered the light bulbs and saved the whales being slaughtered for whale oil lamps.
It was coal that produced the steel that replaced shingles on the roof, timber props in the mines, wooden fence posts on the farms and the bark on the old bark hut.
In Australia today, coal provides at least 75% of our lighting, cooking, heating, refrigeration, rail transport and steel. Without it, we would be back in the dark days of candles, wood stoves, chip heaters, open fires, smoky cities, hills bare of trees and streets knee deep in horse manure.
Coal is fossil sunshine as clean as the green plants it came from, and often less damaging to the environment than its green energy alternatives.
Earth Hour candles are green tokenism for rich status-seekers and nostalgic dreamers.
We should spend Earth Hour saluting the real people who produce the coal on which most people on earth depend.
For those who would like to read more:
Clearing the smog of Beijing with "Coal by Wire":
http://carbon-sense.com/2008/08/04/clearing-the-smog/
Return to the caves:
http://carbon-sense.com/2010/05/06/earth-day-blackout-night/
Hail to Electricity:
http://carbon-sense.com/2010/04/01/hail-to-electricity/
The Road to more Blackout nights:
http://carbon-sense.com/2010/03/26/earth-hour-2010/
Earth Hour – a Dissent
http://carbon-sense.com/2011/03/25/mckitrick-earth-hour/
Viv Forbes
Rosewood, Q. Australia
gav
No offense my friend but I think if I disappoint you, then I must be on the right track.
Cheers
Johnathan, you disappoint me at every turn.
Although not a coal miner or oil driller, we should both know fossil fuels occur in shallow basins as the direct result of this organic settling in older seas and lakes giving us sedimentary soft rocks over time that are loaded with hydro carbons.
Mineral deposits on the other hand depend on the cracking up of such sedimentary layers thus allowing more typical vertical intrusions associated with a gaseous magma infusion from below.
Try again hey
gav
As it happens I watched the show and found it interesting.
Your links help me not.
I'm well aware of the current explanation of how oil deposits formed.
I simply have read a few other ideas about it and they appear to be more sound and realistic then the "dead micro organisms" sinking to the bottoms of shallow seas and so forth.
Hardly anything in life, apart from dead humans is wasted, if there are micro organism, there are slightly larger predators and so on.
Can you imagine the amount of those tiny little things would take to make up just the the oil deposits we know of?
Let alone the ones we don't?
Even if you are talking in eons?
And the conversion to mass to oil can't possibly be a 100% either.
There is more to it than meets the eye.
Since geology and mining is not some new science there are plenty of quality sources -
http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/minerals/geological/overview/regional/sedimentary-basins/sydbasin
the extent of a Sydney basin coal deposit can be seen here
http://www.australianminesatlas.gov.au/?site=atlas&tool=search
For the nature of our Helensburgh coal we can go here. Numbers needed JW, relate to age and time for this resource formation
http://www.peabodyenergy.com.au/nsw/metropolitan-coal-project.html
You guys wan't to eat all the chocolate cake now?
Now; what's wrong with your logic? Coal and oil is only potted sunshine, sorry.
JW can argue with the black coal segment in last night's episode of "Australia - the time traveler's guide"
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/timetravellers/
Re. abiotic oil.
I'm trying to find out one important bit, to make some sense in my calculations.
Could not find a definite figure, no surprise really, as to how many times a substantial amount of biomass had been buried over the existence of the Earth to "supposedly" produce the oil reservoirs?
The biomass in the sea? I regard it as insignificant, most of it gets eaten when dead. It would take an enormous cataclysmic to put all sea creatures into a mass grave.
Any takers?
All I need is one number!
Ta.
Earth Hour is worse than pathetic PR nonsense. It represents an incapacity for gratitude on a massive level. It thrives on mindless conceit and slavish conformity. It disgraces us.
Thank you, Viv Forbes.
You were a day early for April Fools day. (Yeah I think earth hour is pathetic PR nonsense, but your article really does scrape the bottom of the rhetorical barrel).
[...] From Jennifer Marohasy: [...]