For thousands of years, man has sought to ward off the dark by using light to illuminate the night. Now, EPA chief Gina McCarthy and celebrity astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson want to take us back a few thousand years by giving the agency the ability to deal with “light pollution.”
The only way to deal with light pollution is to, well, turn off the lights. This will be a boon to astronomers like Tyson who will be able to see the stars and planets a lot better. But for the rest of us, not so good. Crime will rise, accidents will increase, and more people will die just so that Tyson can study the heavens.
“So is there a day, is there some occasion, where I can add light pollution to your portfolio,” he asked McCarthy during a segment released for Sunday’s episode of “Star Talk,” a weekly late-night talk show he hosts on National Geographic.
“Well, this is another thing that’s been called to our attention for satellites,” McCarthy answered. “The imagery of the United States at night shows all those flares from oil and gas in places that are in the middle of nowhere. It is startling to me, to see the change in the night sky.”
“Go in the big world and see how vast it is, and get a sense of yourself in it,” she added. “It changes your perspective forever. And you’re absolutely right. That’s one of the reasons why we have to be worried about light pollution. It’s in our portfolio, and we’re thinking about it and there are steps we can take, but it needs to be on everybody’s mind because the way in which we disconnect ourselves from the natural world means that my job gets harder and harder.”
So we should darken city streets and maybe drive without headlights just so we can reconnect with the natural world and make McCarthy’s job easier? That’s bat guano crazy. That this person has a position of responsibility in government boggles the mind. For even suggesting making the world a far more dangerous place by reducing the light in our cities, McCarthy should be fired.
Note also her ignorance about gas wells. How does someone so stupid rise so high? The Peter Principle run amok.
Thankfully, nothing will come of this — probably.
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