In service of the Big Green Lie 🌎 🌲💚 🤥

It really bothers me to see that they are developing the big farm fields off of Stoner Trail in Johnstown into industrial solar energy facilities. It seems like one of the fastest growing forms of sprawl these days are the mega industrial solar farms which honestly don’t even produce that much energy compared to existing fossil plants which crank out far more energy with far lower environmental and land impacts. Probably a 5 megawatt solar farm sprawled over dozens acres of land compared to the 750 MW gas power plants a few miles down the road.

I think the obsession over climate change has gotten way out of hand, and while we should take reasonable steps to conserve energy and produce it efficiently and cleanly, on the whole nothing really beats fossil energy when it comes to clean, reliable, low environmental impact sources of energy. Roof top solar power and wind power in appropiate locations can be part of the solution but we also need to realistic about the impacts of all sources of energy.

I think we need to get away from the denialism of climate change won’t be inevitable by the left. All the evidence says it will be a serious problem that will hurt real people. But we also need energy to power society – natural gas, oil and coal aren’t going away – despite the denialism that these industrial solar and wind farms represent. Society has to make unpleasant choices and we are going to warm the planet and cause all kinds of pain by doing that but a lot of it is inevitable. But we can choose to protect our environment and our land, by choosing cleaner fossil fuel plants with better pollution controls over these industrial solar and wind farms.