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In succeeding as his father, I’ve failed him as a citizen.
My son Conor recently turned 14. When he was younger, I’d felt a low-lying dread about what it would mean to be the father of a teenager. I knew that he’d one day engage in the same rituals that I once had: the eye rolling, the whatever, Dads, the prizing of friends over family. And though all of this is now happening, I recognize it for what it is. None of it offends me, because at his core, he’s the same carefree kid he’s always been.
Of course, much is different, and in some ways worse, for him now than it was when I turned 14.
A wave of studies now show that teenagers are sadder and more anxious than they’ve ever been — even in times of war or Watergate or Limp Bizkit. New technology is the crisis’ obvious driver; as The New York Times recently wrote, the decline in teen mental health has coincided neatly with “the introduction of the iPhone (in 2007) and the rise of selfie culture (around 2012).”
But if smartphones and social media are a leading cause of adolescent stress, the threat of climate change would seem a logical runner-up. As recently noted in National Geographic, over half of respondents to a 2021 Lancet study of children and young adults believed that “humanity is doomed” — and a similar number “said concerns about the state of the planet were interfering with their sleep, their ability to study, to play, and to have fun.”
In Conor’s 14 years of living on America’s East Coast, he’s experienced both Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Ida’s floods — with each in their time described as a once-in-centuries event. And though he’s so far avoided the sadness that social media can bring, I’ve lately been wondering what he makes of our troubled Earth. Has this winter — in which January was nearly 10 degrees above normal — unnerved him as it has me? He’s a pleasantly average kid, a lover of baseball and Fortnite and hanging out with friends. I know what the Greta Thunbergs of the world make of climate change. But what about the kid who I eat dinner with every night? I was embarrassed not to know. So I asked him if we could talk about it, fearing that I’d uncover a well of anxiety.
We sat on a couch in our basement, where he normally plays video games — and where, during the Ida downpour in 2021, my wife and I had frantically plugged holes in the wall to keep water from pouring in. He seemed a little confused as to why I wanted to discuss climate change; this was not a normal part of our evening routine.
“So is climate change something that you ever think about?” I asked as we settled in. “Is it something you’re conscious of?”
“It’s not really something that I think about, like, constantly,” he said. I didn’t know if this meant that he thought about it occasionally — that he had to force it from his mind — so I asked him about the mild winter. When people blamed climate change for something currently happening, did it give him pause? After all, our hotter predicted future has undoubtedly arrived. “I don’t really know,” he said, “because I don’t really remember before it wasn’t like this.”
I found this upsetting — he, like any other child in 2023, can’t properly gauge his worry because the recent past is his only measuring stick. It’s normal for Australia to burn, for California to run dry. It’s normal to wear shorts in January. But he didn’t seem upset. So I asked him the question that I didn’t want to ask: Does he worry about what the future may bring?
“Not really,” he said, shrugging. “Because I feel like I don’t know that much about all of it.” Only a few minutes in, his tone had already drifted toward one of polite detachment. It was becoming clear that he had no particular interest in climate change. “If I asked you … do you ever think about the stock market? Would you give it the same amount of thought?” I asked, a little exasperated. “[Climate change] is just not a thing?” “Pretty much,” he said, almost apologetically.
Conor is intelligent; he gets good grades and is funny and thoughtful. He’s not callous or unfeeling, and, at least in an abstract way, I know that he cares about the Earth. Though he might have joined the 29% of respondents to the Lancet study who said they felt “indifferent” about climate change, I would never use that word to describe him. So as my questions failed to stir him, I realized that, in trying to do right by him as a father, I might be failing him as a citizen. Because climate change is very much “a thing”; it might be the only thing.
For all of his 14 years, I’ve tried to shield him, as much as possible, from terrifying things that are beyond his control: shootings, sickness, governmental collapse. I largely avoid troubling subjects whenever he’s around, and climate change is the most troubling subject of all. So when I do address it, I tend to sand off the edges: I acknowledge that, yes, January was warm because of climate change, but also because of La Niña, a Pacific weather system that both heats the air and allows me to change the subject. It seems natural to me that I haven’t wanted to drop the full weight of climate change upon my child’s mind. I don’t want him to feel that his future might not be as open as his present seems to be. But now that he’s coming of age, that protective approach seems less defensible.
Throughout his childhood, I thought it would be enough to do the right things without articulating their necessity. He’s a vegetarian because my wife and I are vegetarians; he recycles because we recycle. There are solar panels on our roof because, well, we had them put up there. He knows why these things are good for the planet, but he clearly doesn’t understand the urgency behind them. I don’t want him to be anxious, but I also don’t want him to lack awareness. It’s a delicate balance: to be environmentally conscious, yet also mentally strong. As someone who lays awake at night, worrying about our degraded earth, I’m not quite sure how the two things fit together.
“I want you to understand that everyone’s actions have a result, even if it’s a tiny thing like leaving your light on,” I said to Conor in the basement, referring to one of his particularly maddening habits. He nodded, possibly convinced, as I went on. “It’s going to be your world … and I want you to be equipped to go out into that world and make the right choices.” This was all true. And yet I now knew that I had to do more to “equip” him: to find a way to give him the facts of the problem without marring his happiness.
After a while, I understood that I’d squeezed as much on the topic from him as I was likely to get. He simply didn’t know enough about climate change to have a real dialogue, and for that the fault was mine. “I guess I’m a little surprised that it’s not something that you give any thought to,” I said, “when it’s 60 degrees in February.”
“It’s nice football weather,” he said, smiling the smile I was so determined to preserve. About this, he was right. It was nice football weather. But it was also a harbinger. As I’m learning with Conor — who’s so neatly poised between childhood and maturity — it’s possible for two things to be true at once.
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Almost half of developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
The solar energy industry has a big farm problem cropping up. And if it isn’t careful, it’ll be dealing with it for years to come.
Researchers at SI2, an independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, released a study of farm workers and solar developers this morning that said almost half of all developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
Unveiled in conjunction with RE+, the largest renewable energy conference in the U.S., the federally-funded research includes a warning sign that permitting is far and away the single largest impediment for solar developers trying to build projects on farmland. If this trend continues or metastasizes into a national movement, it could indefinitely lock developers out from some of the nation’s best land for generating carbon-free electricity.
“If a significant minority opposes and perhaps leads to additional moratoria, [developers] will lose a foot in the door for any future projects,” Shawn Rumery, SI2’s senior program director and the survey lead, told me. “They may not have access to that community any more because that moratoria is in place.”
SI2’s research comes on the heels of similar findings from Heatmap Pro. A poll conducted for the platform last month found 70% of respondents who had more than 50 acres of property — i.e. the kinds of large landowners sought after by energy developers — are concerned that renewable energy “takes up farmland,” by far the greatest objection among that cohort.
Good farmland is theoretically perfect for building solar farms. What could be better for powering homes than the same strong sunlight that helps grow fields of yummy corn, beans and vegetables? And there’s a clear financial incentive for farmers to get in on the solar industry, not just because of the potential cash in letting developers use their acres but also the longer-term risks climate change and extreme weather can pose to agriculture writ large.
But not all farmers are warming up to solar power, leading towns and counties across the country to enact moratoria restricting or banning solar and wind development on and near “prime farmland.” Meanwhile at the federal level, Republicans and Democrats alike are voicing concern about taking farmland for crop production to generate renewable energy.
Seeking to best understand this phenomena, SI2 put out a call out for ag industry representatives and solar developers to tell them how they feel about these two industries co-mingling. They received 355 responses of varying detail over roughly three months earlier this year, including 163 responses from agriculture workers, 170 from solar developers as well as almost two dozen individuals in the utility sector.
A key hurdle to development, per the survey, is local opposition in farm communities. SI2’s publicity announcement for the research focuses on a hopeful statistic: up to 70% of farmers surveyed said they were “open to large-scale solar.” But for many, that was only under certain conditions that allow for dual usage of the land or agrivoltaics. In other words, they’d want to be able to keep raising livestock, a practice known as solar grazing, or planting crops unimpeded by the solar panels.
The remaining percentage of farmers surveyed “consistently opposed large-scale solar under any condition,” the survey found.
“Some of the messages we got were over my dead body,” Rumery said.
Meanwhile a “non-trivial” number of solar developers reported being unwilling or disinterested in adopting the solar-ag overlap that farmers want due to the increased cost, Rumery said. While some companies expect large portions of their business to be on farmland in the future, and many who responded to the survey expect to use agrivoltaic designs, Rumery voiced concern at the percentage of companies unwilling to integrate simultaneous agrarian activities into their planning.
In fact, Rumery said some developers’ reticence is part of what drove him and his colleagues to release the survey while at RE+.
As we discussed last week, failing to address the concerns of local communities can lead to unintended consequences with industry-wide ramifications. Rumery said developers trying to build on farmland should consider adopting dual-use strategies and focus on community engagement and education to avoid triggering future moratoria.
“One of the open-ended responses that best encapsulated the problem was a developer who said until the cost of permitting is so high that it forces us to do this, we’re going to continue to develop projects as they are,” he said. “That’s a cold way to look at it.”
Meanwhile, who is driving opposition to solar and other projects on farmland? Are many small farm owners in rural communities really against renewables? Is the fossil fuel lobby colluding with Big Ag? Could building these projects on fertile soil really impede future prospects at crop yields?
These are big questions we’ll be tackling in far more depth in next week’s edition of The Fight. Trust me, the answers will surprise you.
Here are the most notable renewable energy conflicts over the past week.
1. Worcester County, Maryland –Ocean City is preparing to go to court “if necessary” to undo the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval last week of U.S. Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project, town mayor Rick Meehan told me in a statement this week.
2. Magic Valley, Idaho – The Lava Ridge Wind Project would be Idaho’s biggest wind farm. But it’s facing public outcry over the impacts it could have on a historic site for remembering the impact of World War II on Japanese residents in the United States.
3. Kossuth County, Iowa – Iowa’s largest county – Kossuth – is in the process of approving a nine-month moratorium on large-scale solar development.
Here’s a few more hotspots I’m watching…
The most important renewable energy policies and decisions from the last few days.
Greenlink’s good day – The Interior Department has approved NV Energy’s Greenlink West power line in Nevada, a massive step forward for the Biden administration’s pursuit of more transmission.
States’ offshore muddle – We saw a lot of state-level offshore wind movement this past week… and it wasn’t entirely positive. All of this bodes poorly for odds of a kumbaya political moment to the industry’s benefit any time soon.
Chumash loophole – Offshore wind did notch one win in northern California by securing an industry exception in a large marine sanctuary, providing for farms to be built in a corridor of the coastline.
Here’s what else I’m watching …