Why the hell should it be illegal? Are you certain it is all incandescent and inefficient lighting? Are you certain they are not solar powered? I'm guessing Flickr's server farm uses magnitudes more wattage than the lighting shown in your flickr tags.

Outdoor lighting causes long-term damage to trees and shortens their lives. Trees have a different respiration cycle at night than during the day, and it is inhibited by nightime light. Eventually this guy will have to pay landscapers an enormous amount of money to replace those trees, and even more if he wants them replaced with full-size transplants, which also have a shorter life span.

It's a pretty, fake-quaint house, but it's not THAT great.

JiltedCitizen said what I was thinking. Maybe an expert looking at that picture can say for sure those aren't solar lights, but I certainly can't tell, and I'm not about to pass judgment.

shame or educate them into understanding and responsibility, but illegal?! for all we share, we have very different visions of what an ideal society looks like.

I understand this is a rant, but I for one don't want to live in a world of shaming, blaming, and calling on big brother for every damn thing. Give people a chance! Those people that own that house probably have NO IDEA about the eco-impact. We need more education.

Question, Dug or Jilted, who dislike my stance on making such displays illegal: In most of North America in summer there are orders to stop watering your lawn or washing your car because there is insufficient water- does that mean that every city and town is infringing on your rights and freedoms to waste water? This is no different- we have a limited amount of carbon that we can put into the atmosphere, and a limited amount of clean electrical supply that does not come from coal. It is not unreasonable to limit its use to necessary purposes and to control excessive and frivolous uses. It is not a commie plot, it is allocating a precious and limited resource.

water can't be synthesized from solar, wind, wave or hydropower and it is, to your point, a finite resource. energy is an entirely different story. i think government regulation should be a last resort for a variety of reasons. consistency and fairness being one. do you think it would be fair to outlaw one activity (house-lighting) when there are other factors like highway and building construction, air transport or large vehicles (to name just a few) which have a larger impact and remain unregulated in that respect. by human nature, education and incentive programs (like those in place for construction) are better than outlawing behaviors.

i don't live in colorado anymore partly because i can't get over the fact that you can't collect water from your roof for watering a garden. that water would still end up in the same place. in fact, storm run-off would be buffered. in that sense, yes, i'd consider it a misguided infringement of individual rights by an overzealous government.

Hah,

Dominion Resources, a Virginia monopoly/utility, built its headquarters and energy trading floor right along the James River, despite objecitons by over twenty different neighborhood and environmental groups. Not only did they not install solar to the archetict's chagrin, they put in huge lights for its trading floor, and leave them on 24 hours a day, despite neighborhood protests, despite light pollution for the CIty's river park system.

They need even more shaming!

Making outdoor lighting illegal will never happen. Women's rights and safety-freaks would cry danger.

People who choose to live in houses like this are obviously immune to enviro-guilt. The only thing that will make them notice is money.

So, the real conclusion from photos like this one is that electricity is too cheap. It's obviously cheap enough that the people in this house don't even notice if the monthly bill doubles.

griffin says: "Making outdoor lighting illegal will never happen. Women's rights and safety-freaks would cry danger."

and obviously the fact that 1 in 3 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime is unimportant. listen, i dont like the fact that instead of outreach, we reach for gadgets to "secure" us, but i think street lighting is important for safety. that doesnt mean it has to be environmentally detrimental though, as the streets could easily be lit by solar or wind or hydropower in places that geographically allow it.

however, i dont see the need to light up every aspect of a house at night either. or really, any aspect of a house once its residents are asleep. maybe a solar powered motion light, in a really dangerous neighborgood, but thats it really.

so, my stand, light the street ethically, light the houses when they need to be lit because people in them are awake. safety and sustainability are not mutually exclusive.

"They used to say, "If you've got it, flaunt it!" and if you had money you could spend it any way you wanted. Times have changed"

Did I miss something? Was there a coup d'etat which resulted in enforced environmental sharia law? No, I don't think so. I'm pretty sure we are still largely free to spend our money as we wish, without having to consult the Lloyd Alters of the world.

"when I look at this poster child for carbon rationing in Toronto's Forest Hill, I just get angry."

What? You mean angrier than your usual state? You need to have that checked. I wasn't aware that we are suffering from a carbon shortage, or that it was being rationed. What about all the other substances in the periodic table of elements? Are they being rationed, as well?

"it has lights on the house, lights on the columns, it even has fricking lights at the tops of the trees."

Tsk-tsk! I'll bet they also have a nice wine cellar, expensive carpets, a few luxury cars, a maid, and they send their kids to an exclusive private school. That must really drive you apoplectic with rage.

"Every watt it is pumping into the sky is making carbon, affecting my kids' future and the survival of our planet."

So rich people are stealing carbon from your children? I don't get it. Or is this the tired, old "What about the children!!!" argument?
Shame on you for using your children as a human shield. Then again, if the planet is in such dire straights, breeding children isn't very environmentally responsible, is it?

"It is time to start making this kind of excess an embarrassment."

Well, fair's fair. We should have the right to come to your house and decide what is "excessive", then.

"Maybe we can shame these people into turning out the lights or convince our governments to make it illegal."

Ah, once again, we get to the root of the matter. You seek not mere embarassment for rich people, whom you seem to deeply resent, but to put a boot to their throats via meddlesome legislation.

"Question, Dug or Jilted, who dislike my stance on making such displays illegal: In most of North America in summer there are orders to stop watering your lawn or washing your car because there is insufficient water- does that mean that every city and town is infringing on your rights and freedoms to waste water?"

A false analogy. Implicit in the business relation most people have with the city's water supply is the acceptance of certain limitations. Nothing stops me from parking a tanker truck with my own privately purchased supply in my driveway and turning my lawn into a swamp if I wish. If I were your neighbour, I'd probably do it, too, just to see the look on your face.

In any case, Toronto is not Havana. There is no shortage of electricity, and you aren't paying anyone else's hydro bill.

My whole point in this, is to illustrate, once again, that utterances by people such as yourself, give traction to the argument that environmentalism has been largely co-opted by a radical left wing agenda -- Green on the outside, Red on the inside, if you will. The more of your articles I see, the more it becomes manifestly obvious that what really sticks in your craw is that you don't have control over others, or their property which you don't own. You can't seem to stand the fact that individuals who control their own material wealth don't answer to you. In this, you do the cause of environmentalism great damage, by adopting it as a guise for your larcenous ideology.

Ah, I got it Milton. You don't think global warming is happening, so to you there's absolutely no problem with pumping out more greenhouse gases in the air and fossil-fuel-intensive lifestyles.

Milton has more of a problem with the long-term stigma attached to the enviro movement, if the views he mentions above are the norm. He has a point.

But then I imagine most of the posters are not 'commie' on the inside, they just see the pragmatic local answers to a global problem.

We can all use democracy and individual rights to explain away one person having many times more wealth than another. But when people are having to correlate a global problem down to the individual level, then surely it is totally fair to say that one group of people contribute far more than another.

A report in my paper yesterday said that most in the UK have already emitted more CO2 this year than the poor will throughout all of 2007. With that kind of disparity you can't dismiss the answers as 'a radical left wing agenda'. Most of us in the developed world basically don't know how lucky we are, geographically and historically.

And I'm pretty sure that money still doesn't grow on trees - in fact it doesn't exist in nature anywhere.

Question, Dug or Jilted, who dislike my stance on making such displays illegal: In most of North America in summer there are orders to stop watering your lawn or washing your car because there is insufficient water- does that mean that every city and town is infringing on your rights and freedoms to waste water? This is no different- we have a limited amount of carbon that we can put into the atmosphere, and a limited amount of clean electrical supply that does not come from coal. It is not unreasonable to limit its use to necessary purposes and to control excessive and frivolous uses. It is not a commie plot, it is allocating a precious and limited resource.

A limited supply if CO2? HUH? We can stick as much CO2 in the air as we want. There is no physical limit. There would be consequences of course. Like I said your flickr tags probably eat way more energy than this guys house. Maybe it should be illegal to run a server for 24 hrs a day. Limiting water use is not the same as making outdoor lighting illegal.

It's all about showing off! Say if you can afford to live in a huge mansion, you got to let the world know. Living in it is only part of the fun, but showing the world the grandeur of the mansion while you're asleep at night really completes your sense of well being. May the lightening strike the house!

i worry more about excessive 'christmas' out door lights... then you have whole streets lit up all night.

street-lighting is different - of course it's ness. but they can be the new LED lights, powered by solar and therefore much better for the environment.