[RightWhale]

If I were the city manager responsible for paying the electric bill for street lights, yes, efficiency would be important. Reduce the bill by 30%? Go for it! Works for home lights, too, but home lights aren't the biggies, usually.

[gridlock]

Here is my objection, in a nutshell:

When it comes down to nut cracking time, the political process is going to have to determine winners and losers.

The Dark Sky advocates want to use any means available, including government regulation, to limit the amount of fugitive light pollution. Their reason for this is obvious. But instead of being up-front about their desire for darker skies for the purposes of astronomy, they will dress up their crusade with a lot of extraneous and irrelevant information about energy conservation and environmental quackery.

The advocates know that this will give them a much stronger position in the political process and make the chance of eventual governmental intervention in their favor much greater.

The problem with this is that the political decision will inevitably take some rights from some to give a benefit to others. That's what the politics of regulation is all about. By introducing a lot of extraneous arguments, the political process is distorted, and too much weight is placed on the interests of the Dark Sky advocates. Which means they will probably carry the day, eventually.

I guess if you are rooting for the people doing the manipulation, you don't really care that it is deceitful. But just remember that others will do it to you, also.

So twenty years from now, when you are bicycling to work in the middle of a Maine winter because some enviro-weenies succeeded in banning the internal combustion engine, don't dare complain about how they won by making up a bunch of nonsense about global warming and caribou, because you will have advocated the practice of winning through manipulation.