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Doug Clark: LED street lights a global scourge
Oh, screw it.
“NYAA-NYAAA. I TOLD YA SO!!!”
That felt good.
The issue involves the 30,000 new retina-broiling LED bulbs that the power czars from Avaricesta are installing in street lamps all over Spokane and the region.
Well, apparently these things are more worrisome than even I imagined.
I sounded the alarm about these literal eyesores last October.
The old sodium lights emitted a soft, comfy glow.
Ahhhh.
The replacements are whiter than the fake teeth on a TV game show host. So bright are the LEDs, I wrote, that they block the stars and suck the romance out of the night.
Had these things been around in 1956, the Five Satins would never have been able to sing …
“In the still, of the night – oh, I held you, held you tight.”
It would’ve been more like …
“In the glare, of LED light – it lit up my pimples, gave you a friiight.”
Well, other city scandals rolled along, thank you, mayor.
I got sidetracked and forgot about the supernova lights until emails arrived from two readers, just hours apart on the very same day last week.
Both writers wanted me to know about the global ruckus over LED mania.
The headline topping John Paxson’s email was Mozart to my ears: “Your observations were dead on.”
Never heard that line leave an editor’s lips.
Paxson’s email contained an online link to Tech Insider and an intriguing slide show that features photographs of major cities, supposedly taken years apart by astronauts.
The photos reveal the dramatic effects of LED-produced light pollution.
A 2010 shot of Los Angeles, taken from space, shows the City of Angels as a vast, soft, glowing spider web.
The next photograph, taken in 2012, reveals LA in post-LED transformation.
The city looks whiter than Col. Sanders addressing the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Needless to say, cops love the way these lights make it easier to chase hooligans.
But as the slide show demonstrates, the LEDs are obviously the light wave of the future.
Similar shocking before-and-after examples are shown of Milan and Mexico City. A caption credits university scientists in Madrid for “spearheading a project called Cities at Night” and creating a “gallery of photos taken from the International Space Station.”
If this is true, in a few years planet Earth is going to glow brighter than the descending New Year’s ball in Times Square.
LED-caused light pollution, the slide show narrative claims, can upset the ecosystems of nocturnal animals and interfere with sleep cycles.
I hear you. Ever since Avista stuck an LED street lamp outside my house I don’t know whether it’s day or night.
Sometimes when I can’t sleep I’ll turn on the TV to catch Fallon and the “Today Show” comes on.
“By the numbers, LEDs are way more efficient,” Paxson wrote in a follow-up email. “But why use that efficiency to create so much more light pollution?
“You can save even more electricity if the lights were only a little brighter.”
Timothy McIntosh, my second emailer, is not anti-LED, just pro-common sense.
“The new LEDs are way beyond what a rational person would decide on,” he wrote. “… I don’t think the new brightness is suitable in a commercial setting.”
He put me onto a recent story from the Montreal Gazette that uses the Cities at Night project.
Montreal is apparently undergoing a big push to switch over to LEDs, which the bureaucrats love because they save lots of energy and that means $$$.
“But while the importance of artificial light is remarkable,” Gazette reporter Gabrièle Roy writes, “the value of darkness is much less obvious.”
Thanks to these LEDs, the next generation of city dwellers may never look up and see a shooting star or marvel at the linear wonder of Orion’s belt.
Will it matter?
Will even the owls give a hoot?
Roy points out that Toronto’s observatory, the largest in Canada, had to close in 2008 “because astronomers could no longer see a dark, starry sky.”
McIntosh wrote that every morning, he walks past a certain home on 17th that is at ground zero of the harsh illumination coming from an LED street lamp.
“I say to myself, ‘Oh, those poor people,’ they either had to invest in blackout blinds or they are sleeping in the basement.”
Progress, Tim. It’s called progress.
Doug Clark is a columnist for The Spokesman-Review. He can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or by email at dougc@spokesman.com.