The earth hour is back, reminding all of us to save the world by consuming less electricity. A noble gesture without any fruits though. The earth hour is definitely a show of solidarity toward a noble cause, but it is of no help practically.
To be honest, it has just become a showoff; where we participate in the event merely to include our name to the list of “concerned.” Switching off lights for an hour in a building or two is not even worth a drop in the ocean taking into account the gigantic power consumption across the globe.
Leaving others, let’s focus on ourselves. Do we really need an earth hour to remind us in the first place? Aren’t there dozens of Qur’anic verses prohibiting us from being extravagant? We are repeatedly told in the Holy Qur’an that Allah does not like extravagance, wasteful spending.
Or did we reduce “being extravagant” to just food and water? Extravagance covers everything from food and water to money, electricity, oil and every other form of useful resource. Do we really pay any heed to all these? It is said charity begins as home. And what’s the better place to initiate a good cause than a mosque. It’s a place where we hear daily or weekly sermons on a wide variety of subjects. But when it comes to saving of resources, especially the power there seems no takers for it.
Just a glance at our working place will make it clearer how extravagant all of us are. How many offices, government or private, switch off their lights after office hours? Individually, how many of us shutdown our PC’s while leaving our office’s? And then we have all kinds of absurd solutions to address the power consumption issue. One such solution was given by a CEO of a leading investment company, whose interview, was published in Arab News a few weeks ago.
He said: “Expatriates working in the Kingdom enjoy subsidized power, and don’t pay any taxes.
So why not charge them more on their electricity bills?” A “switch-off” solution is much better than the “showoff” one. — Ajaz Ahmed, Riyadh
Earth hour showoff
