If you have been on a sailing vessel you know that when the skipper cries “Ready About!” there is going to be flurry of activity and a new direction.
Those of us old enough can remember the first photos of the earth taken from space by the Apollo astronauts. How beautiful, how tiny, how round! How clear it was that, in the vastness of space, we had nowhere else to go, no better option. With those photos, the environmental movement took off, trying to preserve our beautiful little blue marble.
For 50 years, the environmental movement has been fighting to say “NO!” No to pipelines, no to strip mines, no to nuclear power, no to killing whales. Laws were passed making it easier for citizens to band together to stop projects. The one thing we didn’t say “no” to was fossil fuels, which, in retrospect, was a big mistake. Colorless and odorless, the carbon dioxide coming out of our tailpipes and smokestacks didn’t cause acid rain, birth defects or make people sick — plus we really like to drive our cars!
And more recently, saying “no” seems to have morphed into a not-in-my-backyard mentality with the power to slow or stop almost any change.
Now the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, without doubt the world’s greatest assemblage of knowledge on the subject, tells us that we have 7 years to cut our CO2 emissions by 50% or face the likelihood of a billion or more angry climate refugees. Although this announcement barely made the news, it’s something that every person on the planet should think hard about. Fortunately, we have new, ready -to-go technologies to do this. But do we have the will?
In order to even approach this deadline, we are going to have to build like crazy, like we did in the early years of WWII. We’ll need to build huge wind and solar installations, a much more robust electrical grid, billions of batteries. We must wage a war against methane leaks and plant trillions of trees — we need them all, and we need them quickly. We don’t have time to stall and wait for “promising” technologies.
So when I hear of yet another group of “concerned citizens” saying they need a moratorium on wind and solar installations in their town until they can “study the situation”, my vision goes black. When I read yet another opinion piece about how we must proceed slowly with lithium mining because it might cause environmental problems, I wonder why they don’t worry about the ubiquitous and destructive mining we do every day to satisfy our petroleum habit?
Consider:
In the US we plant about 30 million acres of corn every year to just make ethanol. We mix this “crop with gasoline, to burn in our cars, to wind up as more CO2 in the atmosphere. Covering that same area with solar panels would generate enough electricity to allow the entire gasoline vehicle fleet to be converted to EVs. The land would no longer need petrochemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. The government could save huge sums in agricultural subsidies and cleaner air would reduce the roughly 30,000 premature US deaths attributable to fossil fueled cars and electric generation. The ground under the solar panels could be planted to native prairie grasses and return to sequestering carbon in the topsoil instead of pouring it into the atmosphere as modern farming techniques do.
Helping your neighbors say “YES!”
When you hear neighbors complain about a new community solar farm being proposed in your town, politely point out:
If it is on farm land, the land is not destroyed as it would be with a sprawing housing development. It can lay fallow and recover for the 40 odd year life of a solar farm. It may be possible to raise crops or graze animals under the solar arrays. The lease income paid may help the owners avoid selling off their family farm to developers so that the farmer’s children may have the option to become farmers as well.
If the solar farm is going on forested land, remember that a tree trunk cut for lumber preserves its sequestered carbon, and the top of the tree can go for carbon neutral biomass. Far greater areas of forest are destroyed every day for paper, charcoal, and raising beef. In the big picture, cutting for a solar farm makes for cleaner air for all of us.
If someone starts to expound on the hazards of lithium mining, counter with the hazards of petroleum extraction — earthquakes and methane leakage from fracking, oil spills, millions sickened and killed by air pollution. Then there are the wars we fight to ensure our supply, the subsidies our tax dollars provide, the meddling in our politics.
Explain to them that a battery made from lithium can help cut carbon emissions for 20 or more years. At the end of its life it can be recycled, greatly reducing the need for future lithium mining. Cheer them up with the fact that the total cost of ownership of an EV is already much less than a gas car’s, and will continue to improve.
Many people strain their imagination to come up with reasons to try to thwart wind farm proposals. If they say turbines are too expensive to be practical, point out that they produce cheaper power than any fossil fuel generation method. If they fret about what to do with them after their useful life is over, ask about how they recycle their cars, their appliances, all the stuff that arrives from Amazon each week. Tell them that the sight of a wind turbine gives you hope: that your grandchildren will have a better future, that your electric rates will go down.
Well intentioned Americans fight like wildcats to oppose multi-family housing in their neighborhoods. Especially for those of us who live in rural areas, the idea is anathema. But the disappointing fact is that the spread out lifestyle we love is unsustainable — one of the things that makes the US per capita energy consumption so extraordinarily high. We need to foster the idea of more compact villages where people can walk or bike to stores, schools and restaurants, and public transportation has a chance to succeed. Instead of fighting multi-family housing in your town, prepare to welcome new neighbors.
Thanks for reading,
Doug Hylan Brooklin, Maine
“The physics of climate change enforces a certain brute reality in one’s set of solutions. And the timing question is the single biggest enforcer of that reality. We have to make very, very rapid change.” Bill McKibben
I think we are slowly moving in the right direction. But it’s too slow and Ed need to focus on speed plus quality.
One point you made made be a little off but we can probably fix it…, solar panels shade the areas under them, so the likelihood that we can continue to use the underlying land to grow crops (especially ones like grain that love sun) is not likely. I HAVE seen some interesting photos of solar panels being used to shade bike trails. I think that’s exciting because we have so much blacktop on highways, parking lots etc that would benefit from shade that the basic idea of putting panels over blacktop is exciting.
Also, I’m looking forward to seeing wave energy converters to be perfected and used in the oceans to generate electricity. John Rohrer of York Maine and his partner have won fifth prize internationally for their WEC design, which is now being built on the West Coast in prototype. Look him up on line. John has invented many devices and received patent approval on quite a few. He turned to wave energy converters with the goal of creating a device that would contribute to our conversion from fossil fuels to environmentally safer sources. Check him out.
Thanks for all your research and articles, Doug!
Janet Spaulding
Hard-alee! The sailing will be turbulent, but we gotta change course or die! Great post, Doug. Check out Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent piece, Annals of a Warming Planet: A VAST EXPERIMENT in the November 28 New Yorker. Right up your alley.