Global-warming advocates showed a hint of how they would run the world in Sydney, Australia, the first major city in the world to participate in Earth Hour. The city turned off its lights and its citizens had to rely on candles for their activities. Even Google celebrated it with a black background, asking people to turn off their electricity as well:

Sydney’s iconic Opera House and Harbour Bridge went dark Saturday night as the world’s first major city turned off its lights for this year’s Earth Hour, a global campaign to raise awareness of climate change.

The lights on the arch of Harbour Bridge were turned off at 8 p.m., followed shortly by the shells of the Opera House and other city landmarks. Most businesses and homes were already dark as Sydney residents embraced their second annual Earth Hour with candlelight dinners, beach bonfires and even a green-powered outdoor movie.

The city was noticeably darker, though not completely blacked out. The business district was mostly dark; organizers said 250 of the 350 commercial buildings there had pledged to shut off their lights completely.

Welcome to the fantasy of anthropogenic climate-change true believers. Their aspirations to make the world a little darker and colder came to life during Earth Hour, even while evidence mounts that their scientific hypotheses and models have serious flaws. Instead of handling legitimate scientific criticism as scientists, they have instead responded with obloquy and charges of heresy.

They do not want to find alternative energy sources that will fully replace what we have now. They want to reverse industrialization entirely, and they want top-down management of energy production to get it. They want a darker world, one in which candles replace light bulbs and the energy that runs the global economy — and has produced the best living standards in human history — gets rationed to satisfy the whims of statists and earth-worshipers.

There are many good reasons to work towards energy independence and the reduction of emissions from hydrocarbon-based energy production, but no good reason to cheer for darkness. Earth Hour is just another absurdity from a movement full of them.

Update: While Google scolds the rest of the world about turning off the lights, HA reader Simon Scowl directs our attention to this month’s Harper’s, which has an interesting look at Google’s plans to exploit cheap electricity in Oregon. Thanks to a boatload of government subsidies, Google located its new server farm on the Columbia River — where it will use enough electricity to light Tacoma, Washington.

But that’s not the best part. According to Harper’s, Google and its competitors have now started building data centers in places like Lithuania, Dublin, Siberia, and Shanghai. What do all these locations have in common? Except for Lithuania, where 78% of the power will be nuclear, all of them rely on carbon-spewing energy production with lower prices and fewer controls on emissions. So much for Earth Hour, eh?

Update II: Simon says (heh) that I had the wrong link for Harper’s.  I’ve fixed it now.