Daily Earth Hour: North Korea

Popular wisdom holds that celebrating Earth Hour has been about the preservation of the environment.

But popular wisdom doesn’t even attempt to scrutinize on the possible agenda behind Earth Hour, except to swallow hook, line and sinker about the supposed truism of Earth Hour/Earth Day advocacy.

Yet there is a living example of Earth Hour/Day. 

And that country is North Korea

Fantastic photograph from National Geographic (as of February 2014) depicting a predominantly light deprived North Korea. From National Geographic

Since the mid-1990s, when fuel stopped flowing from the defunct Soviet Union to North Korea, the famously hermetic country has descended into darkness.

Newly released photos taken from the International Space Station last month reveal just how energy bankrupt North Korea has become. The photos, and a time-lapse video of the region, show the country as almost completely black, in contrast to the bright lights of neighbors like South Korea and Japan.

In South Korea, each person consumes 10,162 kilowatt hours of power a year. North Koreans each use just 739. Other than several small spots of light, including the brightly illuminated capital of Pyongyang, the country just about blends in with the surrounding black ocean.

And North Korea has not been an environmental paradise. To the contrary North Korea has been an environmental disaster. From Wikipedia.org…

Air pollution

According to the United Nations Environment Programme in its 2003 report on North Korea, titled DPR Korea: State of the Environment 2003, air pollution is a perplexing problem. Owing to more coal being burnt to cater to the growing population's needs, the rate of air pollution in the country has been growing.

Water pollution

An unidentified river in North Korea, photographed in September 2008. The North Korean waters are heavily polluted and thereby unfit for human consumption.

Industrialisation and urbanisation causes the water to be polluted and unsanitary for human use.

Urbanisation

North Korea's bid to become an urban nation has seen it sacrifice the tranquil environment of the country. Wildlife is scarce in the country, and "[t]he landscape is basically dead", according to Joris van der Kamp, a Dutch scientist who visited the communist nation after being invited to. This situation is described as "so severe it could destabilize the whole country".

Deforestation

To satisfy ever-growing demands, more and more trees in the country have been chopped down to produce fuel for the people. Without these trees, soil erosion easily occurs when the wind blows or when the rain flows. This in turn burns a big hole in the North Korean government's pocket.

This PBS March 2013 report says North Korea have been at the verge of an environmental collapse

North Korea has been hiding something. Something beyond its prison camps, its nuclear facilities, its pervasive poverty, its aching famine, its lack of energy—electrical, fossil, or otherwise. What the hermit kingdom has been covering up is perhaps more fundamental than all of those: an environmental collapse so severe it could destabilize the entire country. Or at least, it was hiding it.

To achieve “earth hour” hardly means about the environment but rather to embrace poverty and despotism.

So before you celebrate Earth Hour think of North Korea.

Watch the late great comedian George Carlin deal with the hypocrisies of "Saving the Planet"