An editorial from a local paper.
Bob Lonsberry
Lonsberry.com
UPSTATE IS A SOLAR GHETTO
I live in a solar ghetto.
South of our town, toward the next village, down maybe a dozen miles of two-lane road,
they’re putting them in, left and right. Bulldozing the fields, laying the cables, pouring the
concrete. On lands where the Senecas grew the three sisters, and which have sustained
family farms since the early 1800s, it’s all going away, the greens and the golds and the
flowers in their seasons.
No more corn, no more beans, no more horses in their pastures.
Just rows and rows of solar panels, the ranks and files of an invading army, the strip mining
of our day, rural America put to death to satisfy the politics of people far away.
They’re a welfare scam.
They’ll never generate a profitable kilowatt of power. They will never sustain themselves in
the marketplace. They will never be a source of consequential electricity.
They are a way to milk tax credits out of the government, to partner with the politicians who
spin tales of climate change to cripple our economy and strip our freedoms. The money
comes from the taxpayer, the damage is done to our countryside. It is an odd mix of
colonialism and virtue signaling.
The metastasizing of arrogance and oppression, the destroying of a countryside and a culture.
For nothing. All for nothing.
Upstate New York lies near 43 degrees north latitude, meaning the sun is at an angle ill suited
for the generation of electricity, and that the sun’s light must pass obliquely through the
atmosphere, further diminishing its power. In addition, most of upstate New York will
experience, in an average year, 61 clear days, 104 partly cloudy days and 200 completely
cloudy days.
Also, it snows, and snow accumulates on solar panels, rendering them inoperative.
That’s why solar farms in upstate New York typically generate over the course of a year far
less than 20% of their capacity, with the winter months often generating in the low single
digits of capacity.
And that is part of an American economy-choking effort that last year saw China increase its
carbon dioxide production from coal burning alone some five times more than the United
States cut its carbon dioxide production from all sources.
What all of that means is that New York solar farms accomplish nothing.
They generate negligible amounts of electricity, and they do not reduce the world’s supply of
greenhouse gasses.
Further, solar farms are using land that is already helping reduce carbon dioxide. An acre of
corn, for example, the most common crop grown on upstate New York land, absorbs 38,000
pounds of carbon dioxide a year, and an acre of brush or forest absorbs between 4.5 and 40.7
tons of carbon dioxide a year. The natural green hills and valleys of New York are – left alone
– excellent, God-given protectors of the climate.
Further, those natural acres sustain wildlife and biodiversity in a way fenced and closecropped solar arrays don’t. Solar farms are biologically sterile, fenced off to exclude deer and
other mammals, and they aren’t allowed to grow into the meadows that feed pollinators and
provide insect life to sustain bird populations. They are the cause of a silent spring. From a
plant and animal sustainability standpoint, a solar farm is about the same as a paved parking
lot.
The only thing green about them is the taxpayer money going into the pockets of out-of-state
companies and Chinese manufacturers. A society that demands ethically produced coffee is
fine with an energy system that sends little African kids into pit mines. Politicians who decry
suburban sprawl demand the bulldozing of vast stretches of the rural countryside. Green
energy is the blood diamonds of our day.
And in upstate New York it forever removes from production the farm land which is the
lifeblood of both our culture and our economy. It forever deranges the archeological
reminders of Native America, the arrowheads turned up every spring in the plowing and the
subtle traces of camp and village bulldozed to put in solar panels that will be obsolete and
abandoned in a decade.
Obsolete and abandoned in a decade, but standing for centuries as a reminder of the
arrogance of our day and the permanence of the desecration of our land.
The holdings of Mary Jemison and her adopted people are falling victim, as solar arrays scar
the land alongside what used to be the most popular state park in America, monstrosities
displacing natural beauty.
That’s the reality of solar power in rural upstate New York.
And yet thousands and thousands of acres of some of the most productive and beautiful
agricultural land in the world are being desecrated to put in solar farm after solar farm,
destroying both the past and the future of rural upstate New York.
That’s what happens when you are poor and have no political power.
And the people who rule over you are bastards.
Bob Lonsberry © 20
