And the environmentalists said, Let There Be No Light. This is from the Epoch Times:

SYDNEY—If the world’s public is suffering from Climate Change “fatigue”—given the recent “climategate” scandals and disappointing results from Copenhagen—it has not hurt interest in Earth Hour, rather it has invigorated it, says Earth Hour Executive Director Andy Ridley.

“We have 116 countries participating as of today,” says Ridley about the March 27 event. “And there are still more coming!”

Organized by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), Earth Hour began in Sydney, Australia in 2007 when 2.2 million homes and businesses turned their lights off for one hour to make a stand against climate change.

Earth Hour 2010 will take place on Saturday night March 27 at 8:30 p.m. in your local time zone. Lights will be turned off for an hour in a “symbolic act,” Ridley said, of commitment to a sustainable future.

Could one imagine a more clear example of the environmental movement’s distaste for modernity than this “symbolic act?” No longer content to vilify airplanes, SUVs, or even dread plastic shopping bags, the environmental movement has now turned its sights on that most basic element of modern life: electricity.

The electrification of the Earth has been one of man’s greatest triumphs. Prior to industrialization, and the electrification that came with it, there was precious little economic growth; the great majority of the world’s people lived in extreme poverty. In areas that continue to lack electricity today, destitution and squalor still fester. Human life has become more civilized – more humane, in fact, thanks to electrification. And ironically enough, before widespread electrification, the ‘environment’ was put in greater peril than it is today: whales were slaughtered en masse to light private homes, and the coal that people burned to keep warm filled the skies with heavily polluting ash.

Widespread electrification, at least here in America, has led to a more democratic society. Prior to the Roosevelt Administration’s Rural Electrification program of the 1930s, the United States suffered from an unjust divide between urban areas and rural districts. Before 1935, 90% of urban Americans had electricity in their homes – this compared to the 10% of rural Americans who enjoyed the service. Thanks to rural electrification, all Americans enjoy the same basic levels of decency and convenience. This has been a triumph for social democracy.

Only comfortable, bourgeois environmentalists would voluntarily “surrender” their electricity to make a symbolic point. I visited Cuba in 2002, and was saddened to learn that Havana residents only had electricity in their homes every other day – and even then, only for a few hours at a time. (Strangely, the lights in our hotel, which Cubans were not even allowed to enter, never stopped burning.) Suffice it to say, the Cubans I spoke with were not pleased about the ‘environmental’ impact of their government-mandated austerity. They wanted electricity – they wanted to join the modern world.

In sum, the exhortation to “turn the lights off” has shone a bright light on the environmental movement’s distaste for modernity.