By Staff Writer
South Carolina Bulletin
Drive through rural America and you’ll see them, vast expanses of black solar panels stretching across what was once productive farmland. Row after row of photovoltaic glass bolted to steel frames, pinned into soil that grew corn, soybeans, or wheat for generations. The panels don’t grow anything. The land underneath when it’s not scraped bare to control weeds sits fallow. The farmers who sold or leased their fields took the check. The rest of us lost something that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.
Now look at any suburban shopping center, any Walmart, any corporate office park. Acres of asphalt. Blacktop radiating heat into the atmosphere, contributing to the urban heat island effect, serving no purpose except to hold parked cars. No crops grow there either. Nothing grows there. It’s dead land land we already killed and we’re not using it.
The math on this isn’t complicated. The politics shouldn’t be either. Yet somehow, we’ve built a renewable energy strategy that buries farmland under solar panels while leaving millions of acres of parking lots untouched. https://samueleburns.substack.com/p/stop-covering-our-fields-cover-our
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