European markets also demand European norms to labour and health and environment are met, even if tokenistically. To some it is a form of protectionism.
It's also the "why can't we make it here" reasoning. If you tried to make it in the US it would be white anted out by lawfare. That's what happened to BHP when they proposed metals and minerals processing plants on the Californian coast.
My comment was to the more general "why can't we have nice things" about industrial placement. I spent time in Culpeper and the number of "no more Datacentre" signs were amazing. Old folks who retired to the country don't want them build nearby. It's a large federal and private investment in tech services. And growing.
There are many dark sky communities in the southwest that are otherwise standard car centric unwalkable american towns.
I shoot astro, I love it. I wish skies were darker. But I certainly don't blame my comrades for not giving two fucks about how the sky looks when they are asleep after working two jobs to pay rent.
No one else sleeps or works, right?
Plus, who knows why they work more than one job. Maybe they were "too smart" for school, found out later that they weren't, and now are grasping to close the gap due to hubris and ignorance early on in their life. No shame in making up for lost time/wages, but that's not our fault and we shouldn't have to constantly bend and bow in order to appease the LCD crowd.
Every place I've moves to in recent years looks nice, but you can't enjoy it because passenger cars and trucks have gotten louder without restraint or consequence. This doesn't mean right next to a major freeway, either; half-a-mile (about a kilometer) or more away from most 4-lane roads isn't far enough.
For an example, look up how many tickets in any given city have been issued for an improperly maintained exhaust system.
Police only care about speeding tickets. So much so, that even if a noisy "sports" car is pulled over for speeding, they won't be issued a noise citation in concert.
Why? ACAB.
Cops probably drive around in noisy cars/trucks after work (and some jurisdictions have police cruisers with a throaty exhaust because of course they do), so ticketing those violations isn't in their own best interest.
Anyway, noise is way more of an IDGAF issue for any city in the US.
Ammonia makes fertilizer - this plant will help feed millions, dropping food costs. Even if the power this plant is generating won't go directly to families, it will be going into the things they eat and the things they buy in place of power they can use directly.
> Since its inauguration in 1999, Paranal Observatory, built and operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has led to significant astronomy breakthroughs, such as the first image of an exoplanet and confirming the accelerated expansion of the Universe. The Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 was awarded for research on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, in which Paranal telescopes were instrumental. The observatory is a key asset for astronomers worldwide, including those in Chile, which has seen its astronomical community grow substantially in the last decades. Additionally, the nearby Cerro Armazones hosts the construction of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the world’s biggest telescope of its kind — a revolutionary facility that will dramatically change what we know about our Universe.
The price of launching giant telescopes to space is set to plummet in the next few years with Starship and New Glenn coming online. IMO we should be focusing on that rather than blocking development on Earth to preserve previous investments in ground based telescopes.
That's possible, and directed/shielded lighting is commercially available.
However, the project's critics have already said that no plan the project comes up with will be good enough - “Even if [AES] do a perfect job, using perfect lights that probably don’t even exist and perfect shielding, there will be an impact and that will be significant [0]
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/chilean-energy-megap...
Disclosure: I’m a former physicist and I have personally operated an optical telescope with a 15’ dome, as well as a 60’ radio telescope, which probably puts me among 0.01% of world’s population. So I do know a thing or two and care about astronomy.
Given the size of the site (over 3000 hectares), even lights purely pointed at the ground will still create large amounts of bounce lighting. The ground reflects light up in the sky.
The only thing I wish is that some of the parks would be open after dark to shoot landscapes. Most of the parks closed before sunset, so I had to mostly image from roadsides, which was kind of sad.
If clear skies are important enough to block a new development, they should just unlock some land in the Himalayas or Rockies to replace this observatory.
That "just" is sure doing a lot of work in this suggestion.
Destroying an aspect of the dark skies in Chile will absolutely hurt astronomy. No, they would not just be able to move their operations out onto a different mountain range or into the open ocean.
The Vera Rubin scope, which cost $600+ million, will see first light this July. It's capable of creating a map of the entire available sky every few days. Containing 40B objects, several times more than all previous sky surveys combined.
Half of those images are already threatened by constellations of comm satellites. Another concern is spy satellite imaging. https://archive.is/RzCNI#selection-779.4-779.14
So what compels AES, a US power company, to build a facility there, in all the world ... which would pump out that much pollution?
The odd thing is that when I recount that experience, some people refuse to believe me. Of course they are all city dwellers.
And yes - when it’s a new moon and the haze from the river blots out the stars, the experience is quite akin to having gone blind. In fact, it’s so dark I’ve used some of those nights to develop film at the outdoor sink.
One thing I’ve noted is that wildlife needs to see just as much as we do - I mean, obvious, right? - but those nights are always dead silent. No birds, no insects, no rustles of this that or the other in the undergrowth. Every little noise one makes seems an affront to the cloying, thick darkness. Perhaps it’s the same instinct at play.
My place in wales used to have dark skies, even fairly recently - but LED street lighting along rural roads has put paid to that. I earnestly don’t understand why a lane that sees zero foot traffic and perhaps one car during darkness hours needs a streetlamp every ten meters - while waste collections only happen every six weeks.
Ah, I have become a grumpy old astronomer.
The government agreed to a radio quiet zone in the areas surrounding ALMA.
But now there's Starlink and other satellite constellations coming on line at an unprecedented pace.
In fact it looks like there's extra effort to allow only partial shutdowns https://public.nrao.edu/news/astronomers-satellite-internet-...