What about installing solar arrays on farms? Isn’t that a good use of land?

A farm is just another place to put a solar array. This is an energy technology that conceals the truth: We are trying to change things without changing things

A student of mine asked my opinion about “agrivoltaics,” which is the practice of installing solar arrays on farmland, as described in this article from the website corporateknights.com: Welcome to the new era of agrivoltaics.

Here is my response:

Unfortunately, I don’t have a cheerful report. I think the changes we need are so fundamental that they are rarely talked about. So some of the ideas below will seem radical or strange or both.

But here goes.

I see Agrivoltaics as just another solar array.

So let’s talk about solar, and also wind, and then batteries.

I’m afraid I don’t have much good to say about solar or wind. I think they are a substitute for real change. What needs to happen is a radical reduction in our total energy demands, because most of what we do with energy we would not want or need if we had the choice and the relevant information. More on this below.

Too much land per unit of energy

I’m skeptical generally about solar and wind because they require a lot of land per unit of energy. They also require more mined minerals per unit of energy, as compared with fossil fuels. In other words, they have substantial costs over the course of their life cycle.

Advocates claim to be doing a life cycle analysis. In other words, what is the true cost of a solar panel over its entire life cycle? These analyses generally look at the cost in terms of carbon and also dollars. How much carbon is generated per unit of energy? Also, how much money does each unit of energy cost?

But you rarely hear very much about the ecological cost of solar and wind.

Addressing climate change will not “save the planet”

Here is a good article, entitled Addressing Climate Change Will Not “Save the Planet”, by Christopher Ketcham, The Intercept

The Intercept article links to this study by conservation biologists: An inconvenient misconception: Climate change is not the principal driver of biodiversity loss. This article explores the reasons why biodiversity loss might be widely attributed to climate change even though connection is tenuous at best.

The idea here is that addressing climate change is supposed to be good for nature. But the authors of these articles have their doubts, due to the ecological impact of so-called renewable energy.

What is the impact of worldwide supply chains?

If a solar panel is made from metals that originate from a worldwide supply chain, then what is the impact of that worldwide supply chain? That solar panel looks nice and clean and shiny, but the industrial processes that produced that solar panel are not clean or shiny.

When solar panels originate from China, for example, and most of the mined metals originate from China, what is the impact of mining on China and beyond?

The impacts of mining

Mining requires deforestation for the mines and the roads. What is the ecological cost of this deforestation? How many species are lost? How much carbon sequestration is foregone? How much flooding is caused by compacted soil and the loss of tree cover? How much drought is caused by soil that cannot capture rainfall because it is compacted?

You rarely see a discussion of the true ecological impacts of solar and wind. Please see this revealing video excerpted from the documentary Planet of the Humans: Planet of the Humans | How Solar Cells And Wind Turbines Are Made.

Water pollution

Mining generates water pollution, in the form of tailing ponds that pollute lakes that remain polluted for generations or centuries. Derrick Jensen reports that the copper mines from the Roman Empire are still poisoning animals and people today. So it’s not as if the ecological harm ends when the mine closes.

Batteries

And then there’s the idea that solar and wind require batteries because they are intermittent. The sun doesn’t always shine. The wind doesn’t always blow. So in order for these energy sources to compete with fossil fuels, we need batteries.

The current state of the art battery technology for phones, laptops and electric vehicles is lithium. Lithium mines in Bolivia or Nevada might be every bit as harmful as coal mines.

Here is an excellent report from my friend Max Wilbert.

The Cost of a Battery - Biocentric with Max Wilbert

Bright Green Lies (the book)

My favorite book on this subject is Bright Green Lies, How the Environmental Movement Lost its Way and What You Can Do About It, by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert. It’s thorough, methodical, well-researched and very readable.

Here is a great quote from Bright Green Lies:

“We’re going to suggest what is for this culture a radical redefinition of what it means for an action to be “green” or “environmental,” which is that the action must tangibly benefit the natural world on the natural world’s own terms. Not that the action helps fuel the industrial economy. Not that the action makes your life easier. Not that the action seems like a success, such that it helps you not feel despair. The action must tangibly help tigers, or hammerhead sharks, or Coho salmon, or Pacific lampreys, or sea stars, or the oceans, or the Colorado River, or the Great Plains. Environmentalism for the real world: what a concept.”

—Bright Green Lies by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert

Apologies

My apologies to anyone who might be offended by my skepticism of solar, wind and batteries. I am just telling you where I am coming from. I think the message has been distorted because there is a lot of money involved here, and commercial interests have a bias of their own.

But the least we can do is to stop lying to each other, and stop tolerating those media outlets, politicians and NGO that are misleading us and leading us down the proverbial garden path.

How do we USE all this energy?

Here’s an issue we rarely talk about: How are we going to use this energy? I submit to you that if we took an inventory and looked at all the different ways that people use energy, we would say that most of it goes to activities that do more harm than good. Therefore, we could eliminate those activities without losing anything.

How? How do we eliminate useless or harmful activities? It’s not about micromanaging people or taking away their freedoms. We could eliminate most harmful activities by withdrawing taxpayer funded government subsidies.

For example, taxpayers pay for needless war. All due respect to people involved in the military. I don’t have a problem with people who are in the military. I have a problem with endless funding of war. And then there’s the war on our soil, our water and our wildlife, which we pay for via government programs that subsidize the worst agricultural practices, which are bad for farmers, for farm workers, for consumers, for the animals and for everyone downstream.

Here are some more examples of industries that need serious reform, which would be much better for our climate, our environment and our economy than anything solar and wind can accomplish.

Industries in need of reform

Currently, our country is involved in endless war and has done so for our entire lifetime. Did we choose that?

Who runs our government? People who fly around in private jets that burn unspeakable amounts of fossil fuels. Did we choose that?

How is our food grown? In monocultures--which crowd out ecological diversity--on industrial farms with pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and typically with tillage, all of which degrade the soil and thereby undermine the basis for future food production. By the way, this system constantly degrades the nutrient value of our food. It is not good for farmers, consumers, farmworkers, neighbors or anyone downstream. Did we choose that?

I could go on and on.

You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. You can’t make a functional, beautiful, sustainable society simply by changing how we generate energy. And that’s what we are being asked to believe … that carbon emissions are our only problem, and that if we change how we generate energy, then we will have a functional, sustainable, beautiful society.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods.