Years ago, much of the eastern part of the United States suffered a power outage that for some of us lasted a couple days. Power plants went offline and many people stopped driving because they couldn’t get gasoline or because they didn’t have any place to go anyway with nothing open.

Everybody remarked on the amazing difference the power outage made to the sky. I thought maybe it was just my imagination until meteorologists confirmed what we were all thinking. Just two days of not burning fossil fuel and power plants cleared skies up to a remarkable extent.