Well, the second event is a positive one and I am somewhat less enthusiastic about the first one because the situation in Mali is mostly incomprehensible to me and I am not an instant fanatical supporter of anyone who just happens not to be a Muslim. And the 75% tax for the rich in France is just insane and it will be harmful to the country, too.
Prague at night, taken a few days ago by Kevin Ford from the International Space Station. Altitude 400 km, speed 27,000 kph. Picture with geographic local names.
But what the Czechs are stunned by is this plan:
Lights out – France to force shops and offices to go dark overnightFrom July 1st, shop windows won't be allowed to be illuminated at night. The same is true for offices after the last workers leave and so on. During Christmas, you will need paperwork from local bureaucrats for Christmas tree lights that would violate the rules. Paris could soon seem very different than it looks now – and very different than Prague on the picture. It could resemble North Korea that permanently celebrates the Earth Day.
How do they justify this insanity? The emissions of CO2 may be reduced by 250,000 tons per year. Even if you believed the IPCC that the CO2 emissions are heating the Earth by 3 °C a century, which is at least a 3-fold overestimate, it's still due to 30 billion tons of CO2 a year. So we're talking about 10 parts of million of the global emissions which means 30 microkelvins per century or 0.0000003 °C of "mitigated warming" per year. Did I miss a zero? I hope it's correct.
Do they really want to turn these things off?
A rational person surely doesn't think that it's appropriate to pay the price of Paris looking like Pyongyang at night for this utterly negligible – and negative, when you look carefully – change.
"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.
Delphine Batho, France's minister of "ecology and sustainable development". It's just an example of political correctness run amok when an insanely stupid slut of this type whose main "achievement" is her previous membership in various violent left-wing guerilla groups becomes a minister in one of the cradles of modern democracy who may decide about totally technical questions such as the amount of artificial light in the whole country.
Light isn't garbage. Light is what God wanted to exist before He said it was great. Light is what we use to see all the pretty and other things. Lumo is light in esperanto. Light is \(\gamma\), photons, quanta of the gauge field of the only unbroken unconfined gauge group we have in Nature. Light is great. Who hates light is a satanist, a Devil fanatic, a Dark Age advocate, a loon.
At any rate, I am calmed down at least by the clear comment by the Czech ministry of environment that they "resolutely reject all similar kinds of obscurantism". I sort of believe that this attitude would persist even if the current center-right government were replaced by a left-wing one. Also, our newly chosen president elect often mentions the EU light bulb ban as his favorite example of absurdities that shouldn't be decided at the EU level.
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