This article in Nautilus articulates something I stumbled upon many times while making The City Dark: as humanity develops more energy-efficient lights (more lumens for less energy), we don't use less energy and keep the same amount of light, we instead give ourselves more light. Thereby using just as much energy, if not more, than we did before. Perhaps we will always have a complicated relationship to light. Recently, I watched Aurora Borealis duke it out with some city-lit clouds, and found myself enjoying the strange orange glow, somehow a complement to the greens I'd flown miles and miles to see.
