You can sit in the dark for Earth Hour, we’re partying!

Happy Human Achievement Hour!

The good folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute organize the hour-long event each year.

What is Human Achievement Hour? Human Achievement Hour is CEI’s annual celebration of human progress! During this hour, people around the world pay tribute to human innovations that allows us to live better, fuller lives, and defend our basic human right to use energy to improve the quality of life of all people. Human Achievement Hour is the counter argument to the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Earth Hour, where participants symbolically renounce the environmental impacts of modern technology by turning off their lights for an hour.

Symbolically or not, Earth Hour does little to protect the environment and is a misguided effort that completely ignores how modern technology allows societies to develop new and more sustainable practices, helping people around the world be more eco-friendly and better conserve our natural resources.

Instead of looking to the “dark ages,” like Earth Hour, Human Achievement Hour promotes the idea that we should be looking to technology and innovation to help solve environmental challenges and problems. How to Celebrate? Please celebrate Human Achievement Hour by sharing your favorite human achievement or innovation that makes your life easier! Use the hashtag #HAH2016 to tweet examples and photos to @ceidotorg. Join the Facebook event today here! You can celebrate by chatting with friends or family on your phone or computer, watching the news on TV, listening and playing music, or even taking a shower thanks to the wonders of indoor plumbing.

While Earth Hour supporters may suggest rolling brown-outs in India is desirable, we respectfully disagree. At CEI, we view reliable electricity as one human achievement people should celebrate, so keep your lights on for an hour instead!

I can think of no better way to celebrate Human Achievement Hour than PBS’s series, How We Got to Now (currently streaming on Netflix).

The series chronicles innovations from individuals often left out of the history books, despite their substantial contributions to societal progress.

However you choose to celebrate, we invite you to enjoy the brilliance of the human mind and all those achievements, large and small, that brought us to now.

Follow Kemberlee on Twitter @kemberleekaye



