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Well, Earth Hour came and went last weekend with many seemingly oblivious to its very existence. There are 8,760 hours in a single year and thus cutting the power for one of these hours (punches numbers triumphantly into calculator) could result in a massive 0.0114 percent reduction in our annual electricity consumption. Possibly this won’t make a huge dent in global warming and the increasing likelihood that we’ll all be sipping Icelandic Shiraz before the century is out.

Earth Hour is, however, in the yogurt-weaving, glibly eco parlance of our times, supposed to be more of a so-called consciousness raising exercise, more of which later. For now, though, I’ll just note that plenty of businesses around the city seemed to be using the event as an opportunity to promote their own agendas. “Come and enjoy Earth Hour with us by candlelight, there will be a 25 percent discount on margaritas all night!” kind of thing. Rather cynical, really, although perhaps the idea was to get the punters so drunk that they couldn’t drive, thus reducing their carbon footprints to zero at a stroke.

For my part, I decided to get on my bicycle and join an Earth Hour ride from fX Plaza up Jalan Sudirman to Monas with some of the city’s keen amateur cyclists. As I’m sure most of you have noticed, there’s something of a cycling revolution going on around town just at the moment. Young chaps have taken to twiddling around the city on the latest must-have fashion accessory, namely the so-called fixie bicycle. These are basically track bikes without gears, and, quite worryingly, often without brakes too. Hipster kids are snapping up these rather impractical aluminium steeds like hotcakes. They then spend their evenings pedaling between Circle K and 7-Eleven in search of a Red Bull-fueled good time (usually at extremely slow speeds due to the aforementioned lack of stopping power).

And so my cycling brethren and I twiddled our way gently up the traffic-choked Jalan Sudirman, possibly looking as incongruous as someone bouncing a a pogo stick around a Formula One track. As we neared the famous Hotel Indonesia traffic circle, the road became so chock solid that I was forced into my usual foolhardy tactic of wheeling my iron horse into the busway lane and then pumping the old thighs hard enough to avoid being steamrollered into the asphalt by a pursuing TransJakarta behemoth.

Up at Monas, the lights went out, plunging the flame-tipped phallus into darkness, well, semi-darkness. A real Earth Hour, in my view, would kill street lights, traffic lights, hospital defibrillators, respirators and dialysis machines, the lot. Let’s see how committed people actually are to this premise. For my part, I gave up after half an hour and went to soak up the native charm down on nearby Jalan Jaksa at a friend’s birthday drinkathon.

Earth Hour, ay? I can’t help feeling that this charity for the environment isn’t raising consciousness to the critical level of visceral, physical reality needed to break the capitalist-consumerist fantasies of our lives — lives that increasingly float unshackled by mere earthly, environmental gravity, lives that are buoyed up by images on screens and the disembodying effects of surfing the Net. Rather, the whole environmental, Earth Hour shtick seems to have been assimilated into our materialistic culture as just another ad campaign.

Earth Hour is just another excuse to break out the bumper stickers and have a feel-good Kodak moment, while the underlying mismatch of a capitalist system predicated on infinite expandability existing in a world of finite resources is never addressed.

Like the shark that needs to keep swimming to prevent itself from sinking to the bottom, our capital-centric world has to keep growing to work properly. Thus new desires and needs have to be constantly manufactured. You can look in the wardrobe and think to yourself, “Right, I’ve got eight shirts, one for every day of the week, and one more for luck,” but who does? Nobody in the developed world does this because that’s no good for the system. The system has to get you to keep buying more and more shirts in order for the whole game to work, and thus a whole mind-set, an ethos of consumerism, has to be instilled in the subject. Such an ethos cannot simply be shrugged off by turning off the lights for an hour, lighting a few candles and singing a few choruses of MJ’s “Heal the World.”

Drunken musing aside, after a good old session with my friends, I found myself strolling outside our bar of choice. “Oh bugger, I brought the bike, didn’t I?” I mused to myself. Now, I cycle to work every day, which is only 15 minutes from my house, but I’m certainly not used to cycling to the boozer of an evening. Moreover, earlier in the night, a friend had confessed to cycling into a metal pole in the middle of the street after a particularly discombobulating night out in Bali. “I mean, what was the pole doing there?” he implored. “Don’t blame the pole,” I reasoned. “It’s only one short step from that to, ‘These are my airline seats, I’m a very important man, I’m friends with the boss of your company, I could have you fired!’  ” In any case, it was time to man up and wobble off home. Thankfully, my bicycle has brakes.

Simon Pitchforth is the editor of Jakarta Java Kini magazine.