Earth Hour went global this week with cities around the world (including Chicago) turning off their lights for one hour in order to "clearly demonstrate in participating cities, the connection between energy usage and climate change". Sadly one enterprising blogger (via the Freakonomics blog) has found that the reported drop in energy usage during the earth hour was preceeded by a large power spike as people prepared for the event. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Whether the same spike occurred in Chicago (unlikely seeing as the participation was pretty sparse) I don't know. From a carbon emissions perspective it is largely irrelevant since the majority of our electricity generation is nuclear.

halfdunn : flickr

However that's not the killer flaw of this application. LocalCooling tracks your (inaccurately calculated) energy savings and posts your individual or company score to their website, allowing users to compete for greeniness. Sounds great - except that the scoring system is devised in such a way that users with large, inefficient computers (or companies with large numbers of computers sitting idle) can score points more quickly than users with efficient PCs - thus incentivising users to run inefficient setups.

The problem with both of these efforts (and indeed any scheme devised to "raise awareness" of an issue) is that by being poorly conceived they end up damaging their causes' credibility with the very people whose awareness they seek to raise.

This put me in a negative frame of mind and so to make myself feel better I've decided to look into doing some recycling (although Chicago's blue bag scheme is widely regarded to be a shambles) and using some unused juice from my always-on PC to run Folding@Home. Maybe some good will come of this after all.

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