Last week, NASA released a report whose tone was misleadingly gleeful. Called "NOAA/NASA Satellite Sees Holiday Lights Brighten Cities," it began, “Even from space, holidays shine bright.” The satellite has been monitoring patterns in nighttime lighting intensity all over the world since its mission began in January of 2012. The conclusions are unsurprising: beginning on Black Friday, nighttime lighting in and around U.S. cities brightens, and remains brighter through New Year’s Day.

That we can observe this from space proves we have too much of a good thing: Our love of holiday lights has become a flagrant waste of energy.

Miguel Román, one of study’s coauthors, told me that they’re waiting for the “happy goldilocks threshold” of three full years of data to make sure the trends they’re seeing are correct, but it doesn't take a scientist to see this—just take a stroll tonight. Of the 70 cities and surrounding suburbs analyzed—all south of St. Louis, because snow in northern cities reflects so much light—Román and his team found that “in most suburbs and outskirts of major cities, light intensity increased by 30 to 50 percent.” Cities saw increases of 20 to 30 percent.

This isn't just a waste of energy, further taxing the environment. It's also contributing to a growing problem in the U.S.: light pollution.

Two years ago, the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy reported that of the eight types of outdoor lighting it studied in 2010—"building exterior, airfield, billboard, railway, stadium, traffic signals, parking and roadway"—over 178 million individual lamps were in use, up from 73 million in 2002. The Astronomical Observatory at Florida Atlantic University has also done extensive research on nighttime lighting. It found that in 2012, more than 35 billion kilowatts per hour (KWh) were used in “estimated wasted outdoor lighting”—considered to be “lights that are on where not needed or where no one is around to use them, on when they are not needed, or are directed upwards where no one can use them”—and it cost consumers $3.4 billion.