Do We Value Corn Syrup More Than The Climate?
There’s more than enough land for farmers to do what they’ve always done: convert sunlight into money.
I went camping with one of my kids in a state park a couple of weeks ago. To get there, we took the scenic route — we avoided the interstate and wound our way on county highways through farms and charming small towns. The drive was one of the best parts of the trip — we got to see some beautiful parts of our state that we’d never seen before (and it turned out that there were far more mosquitoes outside of the car than inside).
One part of the drive held some unexpected scenery that was as beautiful to me as the farms we were passing. Just as we had become accustomed to rolling fields of soybeans and corn dotted with barns and silos, we found ourselves driving through the future. There were fields covered in solar panels as far as the eye could see.
After a few minutes, the solar panels were gone as abruptly as they had appeared. I noticed that the end of the solar panels occurred pretty close to a sign demarcating the county line. When I later looked it up, my suspicions were confirmed. I had crossed between one of the counties in my state that allows commercial solar development and one of the ones that restricts it.
