I was quite interested to read this story about a rural Ohio county where local opposition led to cancellation of plans for a 400 megawatt solar energy project that would have provided the county with $3.6 million a year in tax revenue, adding up to $100 million over the life of the project. The same thing happened in the small town where I live. The town owns land it isn't using -- a six acre and a 12 acre parcel as I recall -- and had a proposal to install solar farms on the land and pay the town a substantial leasing fee. But the town meeting voted it down. Our town is in difficult financial straits, we can't really afford to maintain our public schools, so this seemed insane to me.
Opponents used pretty much the same arguments in both places. It's not consistent with the character of the town, whatever that means. In Ohio, they said that the land should be farmed because that's what people do out there. Solar panels are ugly and the project will harm nearby property values. (It won't, that's been studied.) There are hazardous materials in the panels that might leach into the ground. (Not so, and obviously fossil fuel pollution is real.) Here, people also just said that maybe the town would have a use for the property some day, which is awfully lame.
What's really going on here, obviously, is that people who know that global climate change is a real crisis want renewable energy development, and those people are liberal hippy commie freaks, so we're against it. Even if all it's going to do to us is give us money. This is so stupid I don't even have an adverb for it.
1 comment:
But "stupid" as a word is a good starting point :-)
We live in a world where the only constant is change. But nothing scares human beings more than the concept of change. Nations and religions fight over the piece of land currently known as Israel, and it won't even be there in 10 million years because of continental drift.
Generally, individuals don't change until the pain of NOT changing becomes so great that they're basically backed into a corner. Then they either change, or die. I think the same thing applies to communities, educational institutions, companies, and larger structures, such as nations.
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