shares the frustrating story of some people who live near Tesla’s Gigafactory near Austin, Texas. The complaint: pollution. But this story isn’t about bad air, bad water, or anything like that. It’s also nothing like the complaints of German environmentalists who’ve been trying every method to shut a gigafactory down. The kind of pollution the man is complaining about is far more sneaky, and only comes in the night.
This whole thing starts during construction, too. Lighting is needed for a safe jobsite, so the bright lights come out early. Then, when the facility is done, it’s just like millions of other manufacturing facilities around the world. When executives see the design for it, it’s normal. When they check on construction, it’s normal. When it’s done, again, totally normal.In the comments, a number of people complain about the lights at night.
Again, putting in large lights that saturate the whole parking lot is totally normal, so it wouldn’t be fair to cast Tesla as the villain in this story. Many companies of all sizes and many, many more homes have bright lights outside, many of which let at least some of the light point upward into the sky. For this reason, many cities globally emit large amounts of light at night, ruining the view of the night sky.
It really comes down to being smart with light. Because we don’t have eyes like cats or echolocation like bats, we need to be able to see at night. So, the challenge with light pollution is to provide the light we need without putting much extra light in places where we don’t need it.For space, the trick is to use properly-designed lights that cast the light only where it’s needed. To do that, you aim light down instead of to the sides, and especially avoid pointing light up.