“If you’re going to vote you need at least two choices,” says Michelle Minton, the Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow who came up with HAH in 2009. “While I believe that a lot of people celebrating Earth Hour truly just want a clean and healthy environment for themselves and their families — a completely reasonable opinion, which I share — I felt their support was being used by the environmentalist movement to spread a message that is much less positive.”

“Many environmentalists see humans as fundamentally destructive and want to force individuals to conserve,” she adds. “Earth Hour is an attempt to convince lawmakers that the majority of the population wants them to clamp down on progress.”