Boudreaux on Earth Hour

Don Boudreaux, as ever, get to the heart of an issue. Reproduced below, taken from a posting on the Cafe Hayek blog, is the letter he has sent to Carter Roberts, President of the WWF about "Earth Hour":

Dear Mr. Roberts:

You and members of your organization worry that industrialization and economic growth are harming the earth's environment. I worry that the intensifying hysteria about the state of the environment - and that the resulting hostility to economic growth - might harm humankind's prospects for comfortable, healthy, enjoyable, and long lives.

So I commend you on your "Earth Hour" effort. Persuading people across the globe to turn off lights for one hour supplies the perfect symbol for modern environmentalism: a collective effort to return humankind to the dark ages.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

Boudreaux goes on in this blog posting to note

By the way, of course, the WWF should award some special prize to the North Korean government, for that government keeps North Koreans not in any meager "Earth Hour," or even "Earth Day," but in what WWFers might call "Earth Decades" -- very little light ever. This picture of the Korean peninsula speaks volumes -- the Dark Ages today; a society keeping its carbon footprint tiny. Of course, in doing so it keeps itself also desperately poor, often even to the point of starvation.