The LA Times is reporting on the impacts of utility-scale solar power plants in SoCal’s desert counties. What do you get when you start building multi-billion dollar solar installations? Solar land-men, in three piece suits, leaning on your local politicians for favorable tax treatment? Solar astro-turf campaigns, with corporate sponsored buses bringing solar supporters to public meetings? Yeah. Of course you do. How else could it be, within our system? If we do the responsible thing for the climate, and create a wholesale shift away from fossil fuel to renewables like wind and solar, we will have replaced one trillion dollar industry with another, and trillion dollar industries all behave badly. At some level, what we’re fighting for is to create a trillion dollar climate advocate. An incumbent corporate interest, invested in not breaking the sky. And when we’re done, we’ll still have all the greater governance issues lying around, waiting to be dealt with.
The Industrialization of Solar Power
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