The Butterfly Effect

 When I saw this call about putting off our lights for at least an hour at around 8 in the evening, my first reaction was… well, I don’t have any reaction at all. I somehow felt that this is but another one of those propaganda commercials presumably from a certain group or even individual trying to persuade us to buy their products by placing in subliminal messages in the commercial. I was wrong.

A few minutes before 8 o’clock, I was contemplating if I will ask my brother and sister (my mom and lola were already asleep) to participate in this nationwide/international blackout. What actually happened was I turned the lights off, the television, PC, but of course, not the fan (it is so f– hot these days).

I don’t have any statistics as to how many people/households actually participated in this event. I am just pulling some wild numbers out from thin air: approximately 90 million Filipinos, probably 18 million households (residential) at 5 people per residence, 1% participation rate (18 million * 1% = 180K households), 1 hour. Hmmm, the numbers may sound confusing but the point is simple: The event could have saved a significant amount of energy resource with very minimal to no impact to participants at all. Not bad? And we are just talking about the Philippines here!

After that, I realized that we can actually use this experiment to address some other problems or to try some ‘new’ stuff that can probably make our lives better.

1. On rice shortage. Once a week, we skip eating rice for breakfast (lunch or dinner). Eat kamote (probably cheaper because you can eat sweet potato with no ulam/viand) or pandesal (might be more expensive, but I hear no reports of flour shortage) instead.
2. On oil price increase. Oil price is dictated by market forces — more demand plus same supply equals increase in price; less demand plus same supply equals decrease in price. What if motorists, car owners, etc. unite to declare a "carpool day" every week? If three to four motorists would agree to just carpool, say, every Friday, this would cut oil consumption by 33% to 75% on any particular day!
3. On helping the financially needy. Once a week or month, skip afternoon snacks. Instead, give your ’snacks money’ to an NGO.

There are still so many things in my mind, but the bottom-line, I guess, is that we can try to change the world by doing something good regularly.

Lighter side, a couple of  thoughts–

1. Imagine if all 1 billion Chinese simultaneously jump at any given time of the day. Will that hit a 10 in the Richter scale?

2. Or 10% of the Chinese population simultaneously sending an email a day (100 million emails a day) to servers of countries not friendly to them? That is called e-terrorism! Nyahaha!