  There are striking phenomenological similarities between Fast Radio Bursts
and lightning in the Earth's and planetary atmospheres. Both have very low duty
factors, $\lesssim 10^{-8}$--$10^{-5}$ for FRB and (very roughly) $\sim
10^{-4}$ for the main return strokes in an active thundercloud. Lightning
occurs in an electrified insulating atmosphere when a conducting path is
created by and permits current flow. FRB may occur in neutron star
magnetospheres whose plasma is believed to be divided by vacuum gaps. Vacuum is
a perfect insulator unless electric fields are sufficient for electron-positron
pair production by curvature radiation, a high-energy analogue of electrostatic
breakdown in an insulating gas. FRB may be "electrars" powered by the release
of stored electrostatic energy, counterparts to Soft Gamma Repeaters powered by
the release of stored magnetostatic energy (magnetars). This frees pulsar FRB
models from the constraint that their power not exceed the instantaneous
spin-down power. Energetic constraints imply that the sources of more energetic
FRB have shorter spin-down lifetimes, perhaps shorter than the three years over
which FRB 121102 has been observed to repeat.
