Human Achievement Hour: A Positive Message on Energy

Last Saturday, from 8:30-9:30 PM, I and thousands others joined my colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute to celebrate Human Achievement Hour. The holiday is both a tribute to the human innovations that have allowed people around the globe to live better, fuller lives, and also a defense the basic human right to use energy to improve the quality of life of all people. To be precise, Human Achievement Hour is a cheerful response to the depressing alarmism of modern environmentalism. The gloomy greens propagate a message that virtually all economic development is evil, because it necessarily despoils pristine ecology. By celebrating Human Achievement Hour, we give ascendancy to mankind, and readily recognize that the surest path to both human and environmental well-being is wealth creation, fossil-fuel production, transportation, refinement, and consumption included.

In fact, Human Achievement Hour isn’t the only holiday observed on Saturday night, from 8:30 to 9:30 PM. Contemporaneously, the World Wide Fund for Nature sponsors Earth Hour whereby participants symbolically renounce the environmental impacts of modern technology by turning off their lights.

While Earth Hour supporters may suggest rolling brown-outs in India are desirable, we respectfully disagree. Reliable electricity is one human achievement people can celebrate. To this end, we advocated that people take part in Human Achievement Hour by keeping their lights on for one hour.

To learn more about Human Achievement Hour, see here or here. Below, I spoke about the holiday with Ezra Levant of Sun News.