Just what is so appealing about going back to the 16th Century anyway?

Earth Hour has come and gone, and just like Channel 10's Cool Aid, it was a flop.

Despite desperate attempts to deny reality, the fact remains that, as any Sydney-sider will tell you, the lights may have dimmed a bit, but they didn't go out by any means.

Interesting too that both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald had to doctor before and after photos in an effort to make it look like it had been a success. The Age had a night time photo of the Harbour Bridge and surrounds lit up so brightly you'd have needed sunglasses while driving! (See here - also for some untouched-up night time photos of the Bridge).

Now, apart from the sheer pointlessness and uselessness of such conspicuous gesture making, I really wonder as to whether the naive and the gullible caught up in this kind of neo-religious puritanism have really bothered to sit down and think about just what it is they are being asked to accept here.

The more radical fringes of the green movement have for years preached and railed against the evils of the modern world, calling on us to renounce, not the devil and all his works, but his latter-day substitute - material abundance and technology.

Just as the 16th Century Puritans in England and the American colonies wanted to reject a world that they saw as evil and corrupting and create of new one that was simple and pure - no dancing and no Christmas (and certainly NO!!!! kissing under the mistletoe), but rather an austere life of simple things and simple food - so the Greens want a return to some kind of fantasised pre-modern world unsullied by technology, a return to nature (whatever that actually means) and a mythical golden age.

There were of course two problems with this.

The so-called natural existence they dream about never existed to begin with. The pre-modern life of human beings was one of hunger, pain and disease. A world where parents expected to watch several of their children die in front of them from sickness and for them to often die early from disease too, after years of agony from mouths full of rotting teeth.

The reason why we are healthier and longer lived now than at any time in human history, despite the fashionable angst of we "worried well", is because of science and technology.

And I'm sorry, but you can't run that science and technology on wind or solar power.

It is, for the moment (and I'll wager for many, many years to come), impossible.

Put your windmill up if you must, but be prepared for your fridge not to work on a still summer's day.

It's interesting that the other great exercise in futile self-abnegation in front of the Great Goddess Gaia, the one where you turn all your appliances off for a time, has been reduced to just 24 hours this year, because doing it for a whole two days last year proved to be such a nightmare for those involved. (I mean really, isn't there a lesson here folks?)

The second problem they had, following on from the first, is that basically nobody listened to them.

But there's nothing like a prophetic vision of the coming apocalypse to get people worried and listening to you, especially when even some scientists started talking in similar ways.

There was a false start back in the 1970s with warnings of a new ice age, but the Greens finally hit pay dirt with global warming.

It's perfect for them. Nothing much has happened, and the scientific data is in truth inconclusive and equivocal about the future effects of climate change.

Just the field of grey doubt they need on which to pour all their hatred of the modern world and, just like the old-fashioned fire and brimstone preacher, foretell the coming wrath of the Goddess.

Repent! Give up your whoring with those plasma TVs and digital recorders. Abjure those cars, those overseas holidays and the foreign gourmet treats tainted with the carbon used to get them to you, sinner!

But hang on a minute! Is this the kind of life you want to lead? A world where people like George Monbiot seriously suggest the banning of major sporting events, or others Christmas lights, even for your tree at home?

(Bloody hell, these people really are the direct descendants of the Puritans.)

All to save inconsequential amounts of carbon?

All on the basis of unproven and unlikely doubts about the future, based upon computer modelling unable to accurately reproduce the known climate history of the 20th Century without the programs being fudged and fiddled to get the "right" answer?

And make no mistake, the nightmare scenarios of Gaia's chief prophet, the Holy Goracle, are very, very unlikely.

Ignoring the overwrought headlines in the media, once you boil down the latest assessments of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change you are left with a much less scary scenario. Yes, the planet has warmed a bit. It will warm a bit more over the coming century and sea levels will continue to rise very slowly.

That's it!

But in many respects it doesn't matter to the Greens whether it's global warming or global cooling or the population bomb (remember that scare that came to nothing, despite the pious injunctions that we 'live simply, so that others may simply live'?).

It's the modern world and all its comforts and opportunities - things hated by the religiously pure zealot - that is in their sights.