An Enlightened Conversation on Earth Hour's and Earth Day's Endarkenment

[This meeting should have been scheduled in late-March, but there were just too many things happening then.]

Let's have a meeting to discuss some philosophical and economic concepts that relate to Earth Hour (http://www.earthhour.org/) (and April's Earth Day (http://www.earthday.org/)). Since we schedule it at 6:30 p.m., you will have plenty of time to return home in case you wish to switch off promptly for Earth Hour at 8:30 p.m.

We have several related ideas to discuss. Philosophical ones include: environment, resource, scarcity, goodness. Economic ones include: economics, capital, wealth, richness. If you already have settled on your definitions of these concepts, great! Let's hear them. The more differences we uncover, the more interesting the conversation will be. I take the term "interesting conversation" to mean one that culminates in specific leads for further study or that motivates practical plans of action. Surely, whether to act on the chime of Earth Hour is a concern of practicality.

In more details:

Ideas have consequences with respect to one's actions in the society at large. This applies both to good ideas as well as to bad ones.

So, with your participation in this meeting, I would like to entertain the very minority view that maybe, just maybe, the millions and millions of people across the country and the world who are set to switch off during Earth Hour in order to save the environment, that they may be wrong. That is, from a scientific, moral standpoint, the prescriptive proposition that we should act to save the earth for an hour from our use of electricity, is a truth claim that is open to rational investigation. I contend, as a preview, that a philosophical understanding of certain rarely-discussed, economic distinctions can enlighten one's view in such a way that by the time Earth Hour comes, we individually can decide with some certitude whether to let there be darkness, or let there be light.

(Note: this meeting is also cross-posted with another social group.)