Of course, as I note in the post, the point is more symbolic than anything else and so I turned off my lights along with everyone else, but tried to keep the candles to a minimum. The real benefits from Earth Hour are firstly raising awareness and secondly the savings from switching off lights in office blocks rather than homes. What annoys me the most, prompting this article, are the restaurants and bars which make a point of participating but by lighting dozens of candles (almost certainly paraffin). They are almost certainly emitting more than they would if they left the lights on.

Ok, so a CFL bulb produces the same emissions as a small candle. If we’re going for equivalent lighting, then the bulb makes sense. However, most people are running MANY lights in their home in addition to electronics, etc. If they use only one small candle for the hour, it’s still much better. And really this is about lowering CO2 emissions. One candle, one hour.

Yes, the use of candles certainly should be avoided. And I applaud your analysis — we need to make sure our efforts are having the effects we intend. Also, it is good to see that your sensible concluding advice is “not to light too many candles”. Bjorn Lomborg has used the same facts to argue in The Australian newspaper that we should give up on Earth Hour altogether, which is the kind of abuse of statistics for which he has become famous. Funny to note that he has changed his tune since his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he argues that any response to climate change is a waste of effort.

Another thing to note is that many participants in Earth Hour will have 100% Green Electricity, in which case turning off the lights has minimal impact, and burning candles is then definitely a bad idea.

I’m not sure I agree though with your conclusion on the difference between carbon in coal and that in candles, namely that “the end result in terms of CO2 in the atmosphere is the same”. If the wax comes from organic sources, such as beeswax, and not as a by-product of the oil extraction chain, and if the candles would not have been produced if you didn’t purchase them, then the net effect on the atmosphere of you choosing to burn the candle is zero (ignoring the energy used in production, transport, etc.). The production of the wax trapped carbon from the atmosphere in the candle, and you are just releasing it again. This is unlike coal, where the production of it drew nothing from the atmosphere.

Of course, you could have bought the candle and then buried it, thus causing a net withdrawal of C02 from the atmosphere — but that would be an active C02 reduction strategy, much like any carbon capture and storage program, and really has nothing to do with your consumption of lighting. You could have done the same thing if you hadn’t switched off your electric lights.

For a reference on the emissions of coal-fired power stations, you could use
http://www.repp.org/repp_pubs/articles/envImp/06analysis.htm which gives the life-cycle emissions of current US coal-fired power as 1,114 g/kWh.

Cheers,
Mark

I’d rather have an evening where everyone bought a CFL for someone is their life – and then you got to turn it on for that hour. Or else you got to do something real rather than playing at being “environmental”.