My book Lights Out takes its title from a famous observation by Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, as he looked out of his window at London at dusk on the eve of the Great War:
The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
Lights Out is about free speech (you can order personally autographed copies here), and thus relevant to my seven-year battle against the Big Climate enforcers. But let us not forget that the warm-mongers literally want the lights out. At 8.30pm tonight in my corner of New Hampshire, we are supposed to extinguish every blazing bulb and sit in the dark for "Earth Hour". Most of my neighbors seem to turn in around 8pm, so it won't be noticeably different out there.
Nor, indeed, will it be in municipalities with a more obvious appetite for late-night carousing: The Great Australian Wag Tim Blair calls Earth Hour the Johnny No Mates of climate activism.
My favorite Earth Hour of recent years was spent in London in March 2011. At the appointed hour, I sauntered down Piccadilly to find that usually brilliant thoroughfare instead dark and all but deserted - because so-called "anarchists" (an odd term for pro-government welfare-funded thugs) had cheerfully spent the afternoon firing fireworks into knots of startled shoppers (including young children) who hadn't expected the coppers to lose control quite so easily, and smashing the windows not just of the Ritz Hotel but of more modest sandwich shops. They then proceeded to Trafalgar Square, where they set fires, lobbed bottles and desecrated my old pal Boris Johnson's 2012 Olympic Clock.
Was this London's all-time greatest "Earth Hour" or what? Massive disruption of commercial activity (doubtless heartening to the famously anti-consumerist eco-Prince of Wales) and normally glittering storefronts darkened except for the reflected glow of burning garbage. If Earth Hour is indeed a celebration of "ignorance, poverty and backwardness", then all three made great strides in London that day.
PS I do hope the Brampton Fire Department in my home province of Ontario will be reprising this helpful advice:
Have a safe earth hour tonight and use flashlights and battery operated candles instead of real candles
Light 'em up!
~If you'd like to see the Alaskan glaciers before they melt, there's always the second annual Mark Steyn Club Cruise, which will be sailing from Vancouver through Alaska's beautiful Inside Passage this September with Dennis Miller, Michele Bachmann and more. We'd love to have you with us, but cabins are going extremely fast.
