Those who are determined to return America to a state of easily controlled pre-industrial low-energy squalor have been beside themselves since the beginning of the “fracking” revolution. Hydraulic fracturing has tapped into immense energy resources, so there just has to be something wrong with it!
Propaganda films packed with phony images of burning tap water didn’t do the trick, so the greens are getting desperate. Here’s a dark new chapter in the War on Fracking from the Colorado Observer: they’re complaining about light pollution from coal and fracking operations located in the general vicinity of national parks.
The enthusiasm to protect dark nights as a “vanishing resource” has also captured the imagination of the National Park Service, which has created a relatively new federal agency to “conserve our heritage of starry skies.
“In fact, darkness is now part of the federal government’s mission in the park service’s “call to action” to move the agency into its second century of operations.
The “Starry Starry Night” program will “lead the way in protecting natural darkness as a precious resource and create a model for dark sky protection by establishing America’s first Dark Sky Cooperative on the Colorado Plateau …”
Environmentalists and the federal government are using the light pollution argument in their attempts to limit the expansion of a Utah coal operation that provides one-quarter of the electricity used by the city of Los Angeles.
According to documents obtained by The Colorado Observer, the federal government says the glare of nighttime lights as well as dust and noise from the machinery will negatively impact Bryce Canyon Nation Park located 12 miles away from the Alton Coal Mine Project in Kane County, Utah.
Well, I suppose knocking out a quarter of L.A.’s electricity will spread plenty of beautiful natural darkness.
Darkness as a “precious natural resource?” That’s the cleverest open-ended power grab since the global warming hoax fizzled. Bureaucrats could stomp on virtually any human activity for generating too much artificial light… a thought that has occurred to critics of the Starry Starry Night initiative:
“Those who argue that the national parks should be able to control economic activity 25 miles from their borders are drunk with power,” said Dan Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research.
“They have no more legal claim to restrict others’ behavior in a 500 square mile circle around the park than any private landowner does, and this is just another way for opponents of affordable energy to argue against it,” Kish said.
Besides looking for any convenient excuse to expand regulatory power and retard economic progress, the radical greens have always seemed offended by the arrogance of humans acting in defiance of natural cycles. Wind and solar power would put humans at the mercy of weather and sunlight. The war on personal motor transportation puts us at the mercy of geography.
The Night Skies Division includes among its missions, a “scientific inventory of nighttime conditions,” to determine the impact of light pollution on scenic, wildlife and cultural resources.
“One need only to glimpse upon a nighttime view of our planet from space to see how pervasive artificial light is at night,” says the government’s night skies division website. “The brightening of the night by outdoor lighting affects a wide range of natural resources as well as human quality of life…”
You know where it’s nice and dark at night, when viewed from orbit? Rural North Korea.
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