Unintended Consequences of Environmentalism: LED Traffic Light Edition
Apparently a number of communities in the Green Bay, WI area recently installed some energy-conserving LED traffic lights as an environmentalist gesture. The unintended consequence? The lights don’t give off enough heat to melt ice and snow, which means during snowstorms the lights are obscured by the snow, which has led to a number of automobile accidents. The further result is that city crews have had to manually scrape the lights.
So in attempting to save a fractional amount of energy, we have not only risked human life and limb (and perhaps damaged some), we have caused a number of unnecessary accidents, each of which will require various forms of energy-usage to fix (everything from tow-trucks to body shops use energy you know), and we have diverted human labor from more highly valued uses (such as clearing other roads to prevent further accidents) to scraping traffic lights that should not have needed scraping in the first place.
Yup, those LED traffic lights sure did save lots of energy and conserve lots of other resources.
Hah. It says a lot about the priorities held by the ruling class when human life is seen as less urgent than a tiiiiny tiiiny bit of energy. But then, bureaucrats are not known for their common sense and good judgement. That’s probably why no one in the private sector was mad enough to hire them…
There is a solution, of course. The state government and National Guard will just start doing helicopter overflights to dislodge the loose snow on the way to the current SWAT raid.
Yeah, and the security cameras that just so happen to look in through your windows as they do so are “For your protection”.
Thank you Government, we love you!
Government and bureacracy in this case might know full well what they are doing – realize the need to scrape off the lights creates extra paid work for government workers as well as overtime pay for when they need scraped at odd hours of the evening or night after normal shifts end. This is a gravy-train for government and bureaucracy – that’s why they do it.