You might ask what the darkness that descended upon New York City last night has to do with Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr. Well, the authorities yesterday evening were still sorting out the cause of the great blackout. But you don’t have to be an electrical engineer to come to the conclusion that the problem in New York City yesterday, in a big way, was not enough electricity.

What does all this have to do with Bobby Kennedy? Well, it is Mr. Kennedy’s Riverkeeper organization that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past month promoting the idea that Governor Pataki should close the Indian Point nuclear power plant. As New Yorkers saw yesterday, what the city needs at this point is more power, not less. And while Mr. Kennedy and Riverkeeper are the highest-profile offenders, there are plenty of other offenders, even those within the city’s five boroughs who have fought against smaller power-generating facilities at the neighborhood and community board levels.

There will be, no doubt, those who argue that there are no lessons about Indian Point to be drawn from yesterday’s disaster. They will say that a lightning strike could have shut the city down regardless of whether Indian Point existed, and that the real issue is not power generation, but power transmission. That can all be sorted out later by the authorities and the electrical engineers. But as we New Yorkers grope our way through the heat and dark, the stuffy subway tunnels, the jammed buses, the long hikes home, it seemed clear to many of us that what this city needed was not one less source of electric power, but one more.