“Earth Hour” Symbolizes the Renunciation of Industrial Civilization

Washington, DC, March 26, 2009–On Saturday, March 28, cities around the world will turn off their lights to observe “Earth Hour.” Iconic landmarks from the Sydney Opera House to Manhattan’s skyscrapers will be darkened to encourage reduced energy use and signal a commitment to fighting climate change.

But according to a recently released op-ed by Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, “The symbolic message that Earth Hour sends is deceptive and destructive.”

“Cutting off our carbon emissions would be a global catastrophe. Carbon-based energy is a life-and-death necessity in today’s world. A truly massive reduction in carbon emissions means a massive reduction in our energy use and would cause significant harm.

“The lights of our cities and monuments are a symbol of human achievement, of what mankind has accomplished in rising from the cave to the skyscraper. Earth Hour presents the disturbing spectacle of people celebrating those lights being extinguished. Its call for people to renounce energy and to rejoice at darkened skyscrapers makes its real meaning unmistakably clear: Earth Hour symbolizes the renunciation of industrial civilization.”

The Real Meaning of Earth Hour

By Keith Lockitch (March 23, 2009)

On Saturday, March 28, cities around the world will turn off their lights to observe “Earth Hour.” Iconic landmarks from the Sydney Opera House to Manhattan’s skyscrapers will be darkened to encourage reduced energy use and signal a commitment to fighting climate change.

While a one-hour blackout will admittedly have little effect on carbon emissions, what matters, organizers say, is the event’s symbolic meaning. That’s true, but not in the way organizers intend.

We hear constantly that the debate is over on climate change–that man-made greenhouse gases are indisputably causing a planetary emergency. But there is ample scientific evidence to reject the claims of climate catastrophe. And what’s never mentioned? The fact that reducing greenhouse gases to the degree sought by climate activists would, itself, cause significant harm.

Politicians and environmentalists, including those behind Earth Hour, are not calling on people just to change a few light bulbs, they are calling for a truly massive reduction in carbon emissions–as much as 80 percent below 1990 levels. Because our energy is overwhelmingly carbon-based (fossil fuels provide more than 80 percent of world energy), and because the claims of abundant “green energy” from breezes and sunbeams are a myth–this necessarily means a massive reduction in our energy use.

People don’t have a clear view of what this would mean in practice. We, in the industrialized world, take our abundant energy for granted and don’t consider just how much we benefit from its use in every minute of every day. Driving our cars to work and school, sitting in our lighted, heated homes and offices, powering our computers and countless other labor-saving appliances, we count on the indispensable values that industrial energy makes possible: hospitals and grocery stores, factories and farms, international travel and global telecommunications. It is hard for us to project the degree of sacrifice and harm that proposed climate policies would force upon us.

This blindness to the vital importance of energy is precisely what Earth Hour exploits. It sends the comforting-but-false message: Cutting off fossil fuels would be easy and even fun! People spend the hour stargazing and holding torch-lit beach parties; restaurants offer special candle-lit dinners. Earth Hour makes the renunciation of energy seem like a big party.

Participants spend an enjoyable sixty minutes in the dark, safe in the knowledge that the life-saving benefits of industrial civilization are just a light switch away. This bears no relation whatsoever to what life would actually be like under the sort of draconian carbon-reduction policies that climate activists are demanding: punishing carbon taxes, severe emissions caps, outright bans on the construction of power plants.

Forget one measly hour with just the lights off. How about Earth Month, without any form of fossil fuel energy? Try spending a month shivering in the dark without heating, electricity, refrigeration; without power plants or generators; without any of the labor-saving, time-saving, and therefore life-saving products that industrial energy makes possible.

Those who claim that we must cut off our carbon emissions to prevent an alleged global catastrophe need to learn the indisputable fact that cutting off our carbon emissions would be a global catastrophe. What we really need is greater awareness of just how indispensable carbon-based energy is to human life (including, of course, to our ability to cope with any changes in the climate).

It is true that the importance of Earth Hour is its symbolic meaning. But that meaning is the opposite of the one intended. The lights of our cities and monuments are a symbol of human achievement, of what mankind has accomplished in rising from the cave to the skyscraper. Earth Hour presents the disturbing spectacle of people celebrating those lights being extinguished. Its call for people to renounce energy and to rejoice at darkened skyscrapers makes its real meaning unmistakably clear: Earth Hour symbolizes the renunciation of industrial civilization.

Judge orders Clerk to spend non-existent funds

The Chief Judge of the 18th Circuit Court, after accusing me of failing to provide requested financial information and failing to discuss staff and operational changes with the Judges, is issuing an order forbidding the Brevard County Clerk of Courts from implementing cost saving changes in light of a $1.5 million shortfall, 20 layoffs, and the loss of 25 more full-time equivalent employees (out of 330) while we work on reduced work schedules of 36 hour weeks.
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Paul: Bill to tax bonuses an ‘outrage’ and unconstitutional

By David Edwards and Rachel Oswald

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) yet again went against the grain in Congress when he stood up in the House and argued against a proposal that would tax 90 percent of AIG executive bonuses, saying that it was a “disgrace,” a “distraction” and an “outrage” that undermined the Constitution.

“I rise in opposition to this rule and the bill because of the problem — because of the lack of need for this and the disgrace that this has brought upon us,” Paul said. “Yesterday, for instance, the Federal Reserve met and they came out and they announced that they would create new money to the tune of $1.25 trillion.”
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The Ayn Rand Institute Speaks Out on ‘Going Galt’

rvine, CA, March 18, 2009–In a recent appearance on PJTV, Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, addressed the current media sensation known as “going Galt,” in which productive individuals consider withdrawing their labor from society. The phrase is a reference to John Galt, the central character in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and a strike that he leads against an oppressive government, and the society that supports it.

“I would encourage people not to go on strike, in that sense,” says Brook. “It’s not time to go on strike, to leave and go to Galt’s Gulch. It’s time to fight. What I would call for is a moral revolution. Let’s get rid of the morality that says ‘your moral responsibility is toward your neighbor,’ that ‘you are your brother’s keeper.’ Ayn Rand presents us with a new morality, a morality of rational self-interest. There is a lot of fight left in us, and I think it’s too early to give up on this world.”

Atlas Shrugged Tops Amazon’s Bestseller List

Washington, D.C., March 18, 2009 – Earlier this year Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel Atlas Shrugged was selling at triple the rate it sold at in the beginning of 2008. Now the novel is soaring to even greater heights, and its trade paperback edition is currently in first place in the Classics category on Amazon.com’s best-seller list for sales in the United States. The 50th anniversary mass-market paperback edition of Atlas Shrugged ranks as #2 and the trade paperback Centennial edition ranks as #3. For several weeks Atlas Shrugged has been holding steady in the top 10 best-sellers in the broader United States Literature and Fiction category, and as of the writing of this release, different editions of the novel stand at #3, #5 and #6 in Amazon’s ranking.

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, explained the parallels between Atlas Shrugged and today’s events.

“In Atlas Shrugged, Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?”

Brook also stressed the importance today of the book’s often overlooked message that capitalism cannot be properly defended without morally defending profit and self-interest: “. . . only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism–and that as long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention–and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.”

Those interested in understanding the morality of capitalism can learn more in Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness–which, at #12 in the Classics category, is setting records of its own.

—————-

Yaron Brook is executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. He is a contributing editor of The Objective Standard and his articles have been featured in major publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes.com, USA Today, the Houston Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, Providence Journal and the Orange County Register. Dr. Brook is often interviewed on radio and is a frequent guest on a variety of national TV shows, having appeared on the new Fox Business Network, FOX News Channel, CNN, CNBC and C-SPAN. Dr. Brook, a former finance professor, lectures on Objectivism, capitalism, business, and foreign policy at college campuses, community groups and corporations across America and throughout the world.

To interview Dr. Brook or book him for your show, please contact media@aynrandcenter.org.

Ayn Rand Center Launches Blog: Voices for Reason

Washington, D.C., March 17, 2009 – The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights has launched its blog, Voices for Reason. The Center’s experts post commentary every weekday on today’s most pressing issues from the perspective of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of reason, individualism and laissez-faire capitalism.

At Voices for Reason media professionals will find unique, thoughtful and controversial commentary on current events and the state of our culture, which can be found nowhere else. The blog covers the economic crisis, environmentalism, foreign policy, free speech and property rights, and provides journalists and the general public with the principled answers Ayn Rand’s philosophy offers to today’s political, economic and cultural problems.

Experts from the Ayn Rand Center are available for print, radio and TV interviews based on the commentary they publish.

To read our most recent commentary in Voices for Reason, go to http://blog.aynrandcenter.org/. To interview our experts, e-mail Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights (ARC) is a public policy research and outreach group. The Ayn Rand Center’s mission is to advance individual rights (the rights of each person to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness) as the moral basis for a fully free, laissez-faire capitalist society.

Is Rand Relevant?

By Yaron Brook (The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2009)

Ayn Rand died more than a quarter of a century ago, yet her name appears regularly in discussions of our current economic turmoil. Pundits including Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli urge listeners to read her books, and her magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged,” is selling at a faster rate today than at any time during its 51-year history.

There’s a reason. In “Atlas,” Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?

The novel’s eerily prophetic nature is no coincidence. “If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society,” Rand wrote elsewhere in “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,” “you can predict its course.” Economic crises and runaway government power grabs don’t just happen by themselves; they are the product of the philosophical ideas prevalent in a society–particularly its dominant moral ideas.

Why do we accept the budget-busting costs of a welfare state? Because it implements the moral ideal of self-sacrifice to the needy. Why do so few protest the endless regulatory burdens placed on businessmen? Because businessmen are pursuing their self-interest, which we have been taught is dangerous and immoral. Why did the government go on a crusade to promote “affordable housing,” which meant forcing banks to make loans to unqualified home buyers? Because we believe people need to be homeowners, whether or not they can afford to pay for houses.

The message is always the same: “Selfishness is evil; sacrifice for the needs of others is good.” But Rand said this message is wrong–selfishness, rather than being evil, is a virtue. By this she did not mean exploiting others à la Bernie Madoff. Selfishness–that is, concern with one’s genuine, long-range interest–she wrote, required a man to think, to produce, and to prosper by trading with others voluntarily to mutual benefit.

Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism–and that so long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention–and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.

Rand offered us a way out–to fight for a morality of rational self-interest, and for capitalism, the system which is its expression. And that is the source of her relevance today.

Dr. Brook is president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.

——

Here is the link to the Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123698976776126461.html
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Missouri report on militias, terrorists draws criticism

COLUMBIA, Mo. | A new document meant to help Missouri law enforcement agencies identify militia members or domestic terrorists has drawn criticism for some of the warning signs mentioned.

The Feb. 20 report called “The Modern Militia Movement” mentions such red flags as political bumper stickers for third-party candidates, such as U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, who ran for president last year; talk of conspiracy theories, such as the plan for a superhighway linking Canada to Mexico; and possession of subversive literature.

“It seems like they want to stifle political thought,” said Roger Webb, president of the University of Missouri campus Libertarians. “There are a lot of third parties out there, and none of them express any violence. In fact, if you join the Libertarian Party, one of the things you sign in your membership application is that you don’t support violence as a means to any ends.”

But state law enforcement officials said the report is being misinterpreted.
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Hundreds Show For “We Surround Them” Viewing

Glenn Beck’s Event Proves The Silent Majority Will Be Silent No Longer

If you wanted to see proof that average Americans are sick and tired of lying politicians, big government and out of control spending, all you had to do was go to the Mighty Mushroom on Dairy Road in Melbourne on Friday night.

Hundreds of people turned out for the event, which was organized by Tim Wooley utilizing the meetup.com web site and promoted by local talk show host Bill Mick of WMMB AM.

The Mighty Mushroom, the host for he event, was packed inside and out, with folks sitting in lawn chairs and standing in the parking lot to watch Beck’s show on Fox on two big screen LCD TVs. Bill Mick emceed, and there were tables set up to sell T-Shirts, food and other merchandise.

There were at least four locations hosting the events across the county.

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