A lot of weed and brush control would be necessary for solar panels in place for decades. If they were elevated somewhat, say five feet above the surface, that could be accomplished by grazing animals, cattle, sheep, goats, supplemented with herbicide spray.

This would add income to areas much needing it.

I wrote a six part series on that which was posted on resilience.org and then on OVEC’s website; I am now working with a group of people to update a booklet called Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: false solutions to climate change. When it’s done (early next year?) I will try to remember to send you a copy.

ONE of the proposed items looks like a good plan to me– solar arrays on MTR sites. They are not good for much else, having had their topsoil stripped away. The question, I believe, is whether the electricity generated can profitably be connected to the grid. These are remote sites, on top of mountains, far from demand.

Biomass either causes deforestation, in order to burn woodchips while emitting more CO2 than coal, on the pretext that since the trees will grow back this is carbon neutral…or it uses crops or crop residue. This either expands croplands (at the expense of intact biomes like forests) or turns crops into fuel for rich people instead of food for poor people. There is no solution here.

There there are the market mechanisms, shell games designed to allow polluters to keep polluting as long as it’s profitable (and even beyond, demanding subsidies) with a pretense that if they pay someone far away to protect a forest (often by kicking out the indigenous people who have lived in and protected the forest for millennia) or set up a digester at a livestock farm or something.

Or it’s a tax which theoretically speeds the transition to low carbon energy but always seems to be set too low to do any good, because of the power of the fossil fuel industry. The false solutions all stem from the desire of the wealthy and powerful to keep things the same–the desire of the corporations of the global North to keep extracting resources from the South and dumping burdens on them, and the desire of the relatively affluent consumers to maintain their lifestyles by doing some technical tweak.

The most dangerous magic wands are in the category of geoengineering, reckless experimentation with our only planet to see if there isn’t some way we can knock down GHG levels without changing the practices of the last two centuries and to some degree the last few millennia, which have caused the environmental crisis of which climate change is only the foremost part.

Mary Wildfire

A lot of weed and brush control would be necessary for solar panels in place for decades. If they were elevated somewhat, say five feet above the surface, that could be accomplished by grazing animals, cattle, sheep, goats, supplemented with herbicide spray.

This would add income to areas much needing it.