Greens displeased by ACT Government climate action

Stevian said :

shauno said :

We need the street lights pointing up so that loon Bob Brown can make sure the aliens see us.

Why mention a retired politician, who has never had any concern about “aliens” in this context? It’s obvious who the loon is here. In case you don’t get it, it’s you.

You just need to read his ridiculous speech the other week to realise the truth the man is a loon big time and he might have retired but hes still the godfather. Replaced by his anti semitic and communist colleagues. The sooner we vote these clowns out at the next election the better it will be for Australia. And we will also get rid of the CO2 tax watch this space next election.

shauno said :

We need the street lights pointing up so that loon Bob Brown can make sure the aliens see us.

Why mention a retired politician, who has never had any concern about “aliens” in this context? It’s obvious who the loon is here. In case you don’t get it, it’s you.

We need the street lights pointing up so that loon Bob Brown can make sure the aliens see us.

The first five words of the last paragraph sum up this government nicely.

The bar was set low.

ALP Promise #13: Undertake energy efficient street light replacement

Greens assessment:
• 1713 lights replaced in 2007
• 5600 installed through 2008-09 budget
• LED trials underway
• future roll-out plans unclear

To which I’d add criticism of the woeful controls on the LDA – willfully rolling out new streetlights 10 to the dozen that all have protruding luminaires, thereby ensuring that we all wil be locked in for decades of paying for maybe 30% of the electricity to go straight up into the sky!

Can anyone explain to me why we feel a need to ensure our streetlights are visible from the top of Mt Ainslie or Mt Stromlo? Do we have to make the postcard photos look prettier or something?

* Wasted electricity (read: tax dollars).
* Higher electricity costs due to need for unnecessarily unpgraded infrastructure.
* Degraded nightime amenity if you happen to live in the way of these lights on steroids (our place is lit up so bad it’s like heavily clouded day at night time).
* A generation of people growing up without seeing the wonder that is the Milky Way.
* A Canberra brain drain as astronomy researchers have to go elsewhere because of the local light pollution – and possibly loss of industry like the EOS space junk laser ranging observatory.

Oh – and the completely avoidable greenhouse impact from electricity that didn’t need to be used.

I don’t think many people would be surprised this is a pet hate. The lights are so bad in our newer suburbs that we have to drive miles out of town to get even reasonable telescope viewing.

The solution is simple: mandate that all lighting in new estates has recessed luminares, thereby ensuring that all light generated goes downwards. Zero loss of “safety”. The LDA and private developers don’t have to foot the operational costs for this stuff – so it has to come from TAMS in the way of improved asset design requirements.