Now enviro-policy to “end light pollution” has France on track to look like North Korea at night:
From The Guardian:
Lights out – France to force shops and offices to go dark overnight
French light pollution law is expected to save 250,000 tonnes of C02 a year
The French ecology minister, Delphine Batho, said she hoped the law would change attitudes in France and help the country become a pioneer in reducing light pollution.
Full story here.
We’ve come so far to rid ourselves of the dark, only to have the lights forcibly turned off by zealots.
Luboš Motl writes about the issue
“Light pollution” is quoted as another justification. I’ve seen some movies about “light pollution” and although one could a priori think that this could be a legitimate concern, I think that all the people claiming that light pollution is a problem are Luddite lunatics, too. There’s just lots of places on Earth where light pollution is nearly non-existent. You may still go there. It’s probably not too important because not too many people are going there.
Maybe “bad astronomer” Phil Plait will move to France or North Korea now, we can only hope.
Locally, the idea of turning off lights has found favor in plans forged by the lunatic fringe that inhabits our town’s “sustainability committee”, run by Former Mayor Ann Schwab, who managed to sneak in the “climate action plan” in a meeting few attended on the night of the last election in 2012. Predictably, it was approved.
Since these folks on the council seem to worship the European way of doing things, I predict they’ll soon follow with the same edict. We have a lone volunteer staffed Chico Community Observatory in the town’s Bidwell park that they fought tooth and nail 10 years ago (I know, I was a part of it then), and they’ll now likely use it as a means to an end since, “Light pollution” was discussed at the onset.
If i know my Parisiens, and I do, when le tout Paris decides it doesn’t like this, and I suspect it won’t, then God help the Elysee palace. Still no doubt under some administrative order or another, I imagine the lights will be back on again, if not by Xmas then early in the new year.
Kindest Regards
Dark skies don’t require all lights to be turned off, just that light be directed to where it is to be used, and not stray onto the property or skies of others. Tuscon, AZ is usually cited as an exemplar of dark skies reforms, I wonder what its night time satellite image looks like.
It will last 5 minutes. The streets of some parts of France are dangerous enough, without making it easy for criminals.
steve says:
February 4, 2013 at 12:35 pm
good idea. as an amateur astronomer, I’d like to see the night skies again.
***********
Great! So you’re an amateur pursuing a hobby, and you want to endanger the rest of the populace to indulge in it. If black holes had categories the way stars do, you would be an A-class hole, sir.
*****************
“Cutting back on light pollution is not a hyper-wacko-eco idea. It is just common sense. It is no more crazy than suggesting that we should close our windows and doors when we want to heat or cool our houses.”
*********
It’s NOT common sense. All of us benefit individually when we decide to close our windows and doors, etc. WE save our own money.
But all of us do not benefit when lights are turned out in urban areas. Certainly I do not pay for other people’s energy expenditures, and nuclear power plants do not “save” any money when their output goes down. In France there’s no carbon footprint argument, no CAGW argument either.
And if darkness doesn’t affect criminality, where are all high security sites well lit?
*************
“The night sky belongs to everyone and being able to see it affects you personally whether you realize it or not”
GREAT! Lets take a vote on that!!! Instead of making decrees.
(says I , an amateur astronomer who struggles with light pollution, but does not confuse my desires with sane social policy)
atheok says:
February 4, 2013 at 6:26 pm
My thanks to all the science oriented astronomers visiting this thread!!
To all of you urbites who dread the dark places in the night, keep your light usage private within your house!
*************
Great! Now address your comments to the criminals who take advantage of the dark to rape, murder and rob!!!
Andyj says:
February 4, 2013 at 4:00 pm
I don’t fly too often these days, but judging from what I see on the ground on the US….
Look at the streetlights from an airplane. The lights without a full cutout reflector have a point of light that is direct light from the lamp, surrounded by the much dimmer reflection off the ground. A fixture with a full cutoff reflector doesn’t have that central point. A typical object reflects only about 19%, so those cutoff fixture do result in a lot less waste light upwards.
Some of the ignorant comments here beggar belief. Let’s get one thing straight. Street lighting does not reduce crime. Where lighting curfews have been re-introduced criminality has declined by as much as fifty percent. Most crime occurs in daylight, and lighting everything up encourages criminal elements to behave at night more as they would during the day. Consequently our most crime infested areas are often the most intensively lit.
Vanity lighting in all its forms is inexcusable. This includes floodlit buildings, monuments, so-called art projects, skybeams and lasers
Lighting should only be applied sparingly on a needs must basis, where needed, when needed, in the correct amounts and using appropriate 45 degree full cut-off lighting technology. In suburban and residential areas street lighting can be motion operated and subject to 11.pm. curfews. Local authorities are not under any obligation to provide lighting, but if they do, their only obligation is to maintain it in good working order. If people go out after curfew they should use their mukh and take a torch. If you don’t and you have an accident, then it is your fault. When all is said and done, darkness at night is normal.
France has embarked on a policy that should be adopted everywhere, and the sooner it happens, the better. This not about becoming like North Korea and comments to that effect are puerile to say the least. The negative environmental and medical effects of excessive lighting are now so well established that there is no need for me to elaborate further. A simple Google search will reveal all.
Doug Proctor says:
February 4, 2013 at 12:46 pm
I don’t have any better data than what you brought, but personally, I think bad guys trying to slink around in an area where motion sensing lights come on and follow their every move will have an extremely debilitative effect on their need to hide in the shadows.
Light when you need it, dark the rest of the time. Makes everyone happy. Except the bad guys, and I don’t hear them complaining. 🙂
Love the idea! All my neighbours having fitted insecurity lights make my night time a living hell, now I don’t give a monkey’s about co2 but being woken up by these lights is getting tiresome.
Switch ’em off I say.
My property on Mount Cardigan features a view of zero street lights from our yurt. higher up on the hill, there will certainly be some visible, but it’s a pretty good dark area. Probably darker than Stellafane. No crime there at night!
I don’t know about you defenders of waste light, but I’m hoping for a good appearance of Comet ISON later this year. Even “Great Comets” aren’t all that bright, if you saw Hale-Bopp in 1997, well, they don’t get much brighter than that. Even better for norther hemisphere observers like me, “it will swing just 40 million miles (0.4 astronomical unit) from Earth a few weeks after perihelion, when it will be high in moonless, northern skies after sunset.”
Comet brightness is awfully hard to predict, but it’s certain it will put on a better show at my yurt than in the City of Lights. Prepare to eat your hearts out. 🙂
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/observingblog/A-Dream-Comet-Heading-Our-Way-171521041.html
That’s the price the government has to pay for having joined with the Greens at the elections. Always better then the greens demand to stop all nuclear reactors. But as with all french laws nobody likes they’ll get ignored on such a massive scale that it’ll pass quietly into history. After an initial few months of harsh control lights will slowly creep back.
Also most of france see Paris (ile de france) as some weird entity not really belonging to france. Here in the south anyway they choose themselves which of such kind of laws they want to enforce.
For example, there is a law that says that 10% of each town bigger then x inhabitants must be controlled rent, if not you get fined. My town doesn’t get anywhere near that so they get fined 4 million euros yearly. So they applied for a departmental grant to pay the fine which they got.
This new idea from politics makes no sense. As said before, France electricity is 80% or so nuclear. Such power plants take far more than 8 hours to slow down. As a result, even if you turn off all the lights, it does not reduce the total power produced by such power plants.
Second point, this law does not seem to apply to street lights…which are the first source of “light pollution” far before shop lights, this law will have no effect at all.
This law is what people experience every day in France: spectacle politics…no need to make sense politics have to make a show and be on the scene to bump their career.
By the way, the surrender joke is getting seriously old. Few times an english speaking person felt obliged to inform me french surrender all the time. When I asked them to go out with me to check if it is true… guess what they declined the offer…that’s probably modesty.
It’s not light pollution inside the buildings. That’s where they want the lights off.
No more partial lighting of business premises so that security patrols can easily see intruders inside the buildings through the windows.
The “pollution” that the law purports to curtail is that of notional CO2 emissions from the production of a small amount of electricity. Calculated on a soggy beer mat made of hemp using pure assumptions.
It’s not the light from the street lights.
It’s not the light from the public places.
It’s not the light from the palaces.
It’s not the light from the millions of motor vehicles.
It’s not the light from anywhere.
It’s the “CO2 pollution”.
Activists and politicians with not respect for language or the intelligence of others have decided to hijack yet another term that has a useful meaning and pervert it to their own interpretation. Sadly; some of those who want to enjoy the brilliance of a clear night sky will not recognize that “light pollution” means something else to those who wish to be their masters.
If i know my south of France they’ll wipe their backside with this law. Outside of Ile de France most departments decide for themselves which laws they want to enforce. Since the Riviera is 100% tourist dependent they are not likely to make the towns dead at night.
That’s what you get for having taken daft Greens in your government. Daft laws that have no public support and therefore doomed to fail.
I don’t get it. Why not? What’s wrong with energy efficiency? It is not “luddite”. This must be one of the worst posts ever on this site.
I like astronomy too and at the age of about 14 i realized that living in a suburb is a bad precondition for my hobby, but instead of raging against the civilization and it’s weird preference of light over darkness i soon realized that i can’t force millions of people in my metropolitan area to change their habits just because of my and maybe a few hundred fellow astronomers’ wish for a dark sky.
Instead of changing the habits of millions of people for the desire of just a few, wouldn’t it be easier to tell the few to find a dark location, even if it’s a 2 hour trip? Urban astronomers aren’t the only one with the wrong hobby for their residence. Think about all the hunters, mountaineers and surfers in metropolitan areas, who are not calling for a replica of the alps near Paris, a pasture ground for bisons in the NY Central Park or the Pacific coast near Denver.
Maybe theres a less arrogant solution than the french state directed behavioural dictate. A friend of mine has a remote controlled telescope which he operates from his living room. The telesope is in his backyard and his purpose was to spend more time with his family instead of hours in the cold, but in the age of the internet it wouldn’t make any difference if it was located houndreds of miles away. It requires just a small shelter with a retractable roof, which could be remote controlled too. The problem of leaving your expensive telescope alone in the wildness could be solved by asking a villager if you could place the shelter somewhere in his backyard and pay him 10$ per month for his 20 ft² and maybe another 5$ for using his internet access by WLAN.
As an architect I know it’s rare for exterior lights to shine directly towards the sky. By requiring cutoff fixtures, more poles have to be installed at much greater costs. This means low output led and solar fixture are more cost competive with traditional light systems.
The only way to make the astronomers truly happy is the North Korean solution. No lights for you! For the rest of us, the light bouncing off the ground is enough to blot out stars.
You can have well lit streets and dark skies – just don’t let the light go upwards. As ever, it is the European method of going about things, and the generally sinister agenda behind it all, that is the problem.
Don’t fall for this smoke screen it’s nothing to do with light pollution. It’s purely economics. This action is just to save money. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-is-totally-bankrupt-french-jobs-minister-michel-sapin-embarrasses-francois-hollande-with-shocking-statement-on-state-of-the-countrys-economy-8471077.html)
Don’t be dazzled by the spin. This is about their economy, not light pollution. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-is-totally-bankrupt-french-jobs-minister-michel-sapin-embarrasses-francois-hollande-with-shocking-statement-on-state-of-the-countrys-economy-8471077.html
Geez, did anyone actually *read* the article? They want office buildings to turn out the lights when no one is there. They want lights in business displays turned off after 1am, i.e., when no one is going to see them (exceptions for areas where it makes sense). They are not talking about turning off street lights, or indeed turning off any lights that people actually need.
Light pollution is a mess for anyone who would like to enjoy the sky at night. I am old enough to remember seeing the Milky Way at night; I haven’t seen it for decades. I expect there are lots of people younger than me who have never seen it; anywhere within 100 miles of any major city, you can only see the brightest planets and stars.
Energy is cheap enough that many businesses leave their buildings lit all night long. Signs and outdoor lights spew their light in all directions. You don’t have to buy the bogus CO2 argument; this is (a) wasteful and (b) creates light pollution, which some of us really do care about.
Surely it should be done or otherwise based on the real information on crime in badly lit areas against the cost in energy of lighting the areas. I do think we should be looking at better designed lights so less is wasted going upwards though.
To do anything based on CO2 emissions is lunacy when we are so close to the date when they should be taken to task for the utter failure of their predictions. On the expiry of the hundred months prediction all awards should be returned and any money made form climate change subsidies returned to the tax payers who provided it. Rationally we are already past the point when we can be certain they failed or lied to us.
a_random_guy says:
February 5, 2013 at 12:17 am
I read the article. Under the guise of stopping “light pollution” they plan to force people to turn off the lights inside of the buildings, including presumably rooms with no windows … while leaving the street lights turned on …
How exactly is that going to reduce light pollution?
MrE says:
February 4, 2013 at 11:23 pm
Energy efficiency? Who said anything about that? They are selling this as being about “light pollution”, with the subtitle “French light pollution law is expected to save 250,000 tonnes of C02 a year” … so energy isn’t even mentioned.
For both of you, the issue is the simultaneously draconian and ineffective nature of the regulations, along with them being just a fig leaf for CO2. I leave a light on inside my piano to keep the moisture out. Under the French law would I have to turn it off?
It is the bumbling draconian police-state nature of the law that I object to. In high-crime areas businesses often leave lights on, both inside and outside, for security. I’m sorry, but the astronomers are gonna have to suck it up, I’d rather the businesses be secure.
And of course, there is the the transparent attempt to sell their damned pathological paleocarbophobia under another brand name. This gets old.
So, you two guys, that’s why the French law sucks.
w.
PS—a_random_guy, If it is indeed true that in French cities there’s no one looking at the business signs at one am, I feel sorry for the poor bastards. Times Square at 1 AM is rolling along quite nicely, as is the local bar down the road. In fact, random, if you were to tell the bars and honkeytonks across the US that they have to shut off their lighted signs at one o’clock because the French think it’s a good plan and so do you, I wouldn’t want to be your insurance agent … you sure you think this French farce is a reasonable idea?
Not to understand the importance of after-hours lighting for shops is only possible if you are a Guardian journalist or a Mitterand generation French bureaucrat. It takes a lot of insulation from common experience to achieve that kind of daffiness. Never mind…
I’ll go out on a limb with this. Look for some serious resistance to green wank in Europe very soon…and expect it to come from the most unlikely source: the French!
The French can be the lamest conformists – for a while. When Robespierre imposed a new fruitcake religion and philosophy on the common Frenchman, his power seemed absolute, and people submitted slavishly. He even got the Parisians to skip lunch to endure the first Festival of the Supreme Being. (The “skip lunch” bit was his biggest mistake.) Robespierre was headless by the end of the following month, and, a few years later, Napoleon had his crappy religion banned as a cult.
I say all this because, though I think I’m as good a redneck as any, I have a lot of time for the French. They can go along with more wank than anybody else…but they can toss it off more violently and unexpectedly than anybody else. Mitterand’s bureaucrat hordes are countless as the stars, and that French public teat is enormous…but I have hope! Allez les Bleus!
This year there could be 3 bright comets (hopefully as good as hale-bopp), I’d love to get a great view.
In the south-east of England it is very hard to get a clear view of the skies due to most of the light produced going where it’s not needed (i.e. the sky).
Last year we had all our street lights changed to direct the light downward and be more energy efficient and this had the following advantages:
1) It has the streets are much better lit as the light goes down where it’s needed;
2) Our bedroom is right next to a street light and it is no longer lit up like a Christmas tree 🙂
3) We get a better view of the sky, when it doesn’t rain (very rare since last April);
4) The local council saves millions of pounds in electricity bills, which means the money can be spent on other services;
5) The lights themselves have a much better lifetime and thus need less maintenance;
6) The light is now a white light and you can see much better than with the old lights.
I don’t give a toss about the CO2 and I’m not aware of any negatives.
Having seen new technology used it’s good to see that it is a massive improvement.