You may have noticed a trend in the past two years: Liberal individuals or publications coming around to realize what conservatives have long known. Positions once mocked and derided become the new “one easy trick.”
Make people pay the fare on the subway, treat parenthood as a uniquely important relationship, pay parents straight cash when they have a baby, and don’t let boys compete in girls’ sports.
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The latest: Reliable electric street lighting can reduce crime. Check out this new article in the Atlantic:
“Over the past 15 years, researchers have made a big push to test these hunches in a systematic way, and the data on lighting proved significant. Darkness is indeed a good cover for crime, so better lighting can make streets safer, not just by deterring misdeeds but also by encouraging others to fill the streets with activity…”
One researcher studied “a plan in Philadelphia to upgrade about 34,000 streetlights citywide with brighter LED bulbs” and found it “correlated with a 15 percent drop in outdoor nighttime street crimes and a 21 percent drop in outdoor nighttime gun violence. Local residents told interviewers that the lights made them feel more comfortable inhabiting public spaces because their neighborhoods felt safer.”
This is total vindication for Rick Perry. You see, this same magazine, the Atlantic, carried an article in 2019 attacking the Republican Party for being in love with fossil fuels — he calls it “carbonism.” The piece attacked Perry, who was Trump’s former energy secretary, as a “carbonist.”
“Carbonists become desperately anti-progress, or they reuse old arguments in bizarre new ways,” the article reads. “Hence Perry’s 2017 claim that fossil fuels somehow reduce sexual assault in ‘those villages in Africa.’”
Yes, for the avant-garde in 2019, it was anti-progress, bizarre, and outdated for Perry to defend natural-gas drilling on the grounds that crime, including sexual assault, was curbed “when the lights are on.”
Perry’s argument — reliable lighting reduces crime — is now accepted as the one easy trick for reducing urban crime, was roundly mocked by an incurious and partisan media.
If you think I’m skipping a step in the argument, try to find someone who will argue that wind and solar are as reliable and continuous as fossil fuels in providing electricity. What’s more, the intermittence of these energy sources has a much bigger effect in poorer places than it does in wealthier ones. So if you want cities in Africa or Southeast Asia to be safer, you want coal or natural-gas-powered electricity.
Rick Perry was right all along. Oops!
