Yes. The U.N. claimed it was using $81,000 worth of electricity per hour to light its Gotham headquarters.
After getting called on this fiction, the number dropped to $102:
It’s called Earth Hour — and among the places where the lights will go out are the Eiffel Tower, the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing, the Pyramids of Giza and Niagara Falls.
And, for the first time in the event’s three-year existence, the New York headquarters of the United Nations will also go dark, a move officials say will save $102, a figure that fluctuated wildly from its whopping initial estimate of $81,000 when requested from U.N. officials. After the story appeared on FOXNews.com, a spokeswoman called back to say their estimate was incorrect and the savings was $24,000, but then called back a third time to say it was really $102.
Earth Hour — 8:30 to 9:30 p.m in every time zone on the planet — promises to be “the largest demonstration of public concern about climate change ever attempted,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said earlier this month.
To add to the comedy, NRO contributor Claudia Rosett gets in some nice jabs at her UN nemeses:
“It’s an attention-grabbing gesture that they expect to pay off for them big time,” Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told FOXNews.com. “For the U.N., climate change is the biggest cash cow of all time. They expect it to pay off for them big-time at the enormous and unaffordable expense of this and future generations.”
Critics like Rosett say the U.N.’s role in Earth Hour is merely the public face of its much larger push to reorder the world’s economy with new taxes, tariffs and subsidies for greenhouse gas abatement.
“It’s an immensely destructive gesture,” Rosett said. “The U.N. has been busy manipulating and politicizing the science on this for years. . . . The whole climate obsession has the potential to make Oil for Food look like a drop in the ocean.”
More comedy you say? Here’s Bjorn Lomborg on how the stunt will actually increase CO2 emissions:
But Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and director of the Denmark-based think tank Copenhagen Consensus Centre, said the event could actually increase emissions.
“When asked to extinguish electricity, people turn to candlelight,” Lomborg wrote in an op-ed in The Australian. “Candles seem natural, but are almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light globes, and more than 300 times less efficient than fluorescent lights. If you use one candle for each extinguished globe, you’re essentially not cutting CO2 at all, and with two candles you’ll emit more CO2. Moreover, candles produce indoor air pollution 10 to 100 times the level of pollution caused by all cars, industry and electricity production.”