Darkness of The Sun

Below is my column as submitted to the editor of the Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine for the July, 2019 issue.

The drive from Long Hill to Sturbridge is routine, but barring some auto mishap, mostly pleasant.  At certain times of day, sunrise or sunset, it can be sublime.  There is a farm on the left that milks cows.  Out front is occasionally something for sale with small signage.

This June, there was a different type of sign up.  It was not on a poster nor did it look carefully drawn.  It consisted of two white wrapped hay bales with words written in black, "Stop the Solar Farm."  

Unless you drive with blinders on, you've seen them.  They seem to be situated on slopes that decline gradually to take advantage of the sun.  Whatever view existed previously is now completely obscured by banks of panels.  Sometimes, what seems a whole forest is uprooted to set it up.

The farmer who put up that bale sign appears to have had some unwanted controversy and announced his withdrawal from the battle on social media.

If instead of heading to Sturbridge one takes Brookfield Road towards Brimfield many more protest signs come into view on the right.  It turns out that the panels are to be set on a hill behind those dwellings. 

 Not everyone was going silent and social media had leads to other opponents.

Krista Virchow is a longtime resident and her sister lives next door.  She will be directly affected and when I spoke with her, her voice was emotional and the concern was heartfelt.  Krista with deep roots elsewhere, chose to live along Brookfield Road saying "my home is my life."

I spoke to Krista's brother-in law, Mike Burke, who said one day heavy equipment arrived to build an access road through the driveway Krista and Mike and his wife share.  He was able to send them off, but that will hardly be the end of it.  The forested hill is to be clear cut.

The solar company made Krista and her sister an offer of $3,000 each for 25 years to use the right of way between their neighboring houses.  They might have been trying some divide and conquer tactics as they also offered one sibling $6,000 for an easement.

Mike told me of the fortune being offered to the landowners who will be able to move away while all their neighbors are stuck.

There was a meeting at the town hall on June 17th with lots of questions and few answers and it is to be continued.  It turns out, there are other solar farms on tap for Warren.  Townspeople are in for a long fight.

Can the little guys win?  The odds are not good.  Over in Monson, a similar battle has been going on since 2016 and it is not over yet.  Jessica Lee Allen is a daughter of the town and lifelong resident.  It also appears that she is the point person in the opposition.

It is from Jessica I first heard the term, "Big Solar."  We've all heard of Big Pharma (much in the news with the Opioid crisis), Big Tech, the Big Banks, et al.  When you put Big in front of an industry, it signals a negative.

It is hard to blame Ms. Allen for the way she feels.  She and other citizens voted it down on August 22, 2016, but the Big Solar Company saw that coming and filed what is known as an ANR or Approval Not Required on the 17th to get the project grandfathered.

It appears enterprises that are part of Big Solar and their legal teams learn from each project while for the small-town folk who want to resist, it is always, as one might say, "the first rodeo."

Supposedly, the Monson solar farm, though built, does not have final approval to be running.  Something is happening as Jessica and her mom hear an audible hum coming from the project.  I heard it too when I visited the array.

In an inquiry to Mass DOER (Department of Energy Resources) to find out if there were any subsidies to the project we came up empty, as the state agency claimed no knowledge of a project at the stated address.  DOER did acknowledge one down the street that became operational in February of this year, but according to Jessica, that address does not exist.

As it is, Jessica and the team fight on though the panels are up and humming.

In an interesting and informative book, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, Professor David Goodstein surveyed the forms of energy available on this earth and what they can do for us.  The tone of his book is pessimistic.

Dr. Goodstein is a professor of physics and applied physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), one of the premier scientific universities in the world, and no diploma mill.  Maybe the man is not infallible, but he is hardly making anything up.

If civilization is to survive, solar will be huge, if not the major part of the equation.  From Out of Gas, it is clear, we are not there yet.  Advances are being made, but compared to what we need, the state of the art is primitive.

We can see some evidence of that just by reading or listening to ads for rooftop solar.  If it were perfected, there would not be the need to push tax incentives to homeowners to panel the roof.  Your columnist has looked into it for his residence, but though there are some good reasons, the benefits are not that large, at this time.

In the April issue of this magazine, supergrids were discussed.  A supergrid can take power from a region where it is easier to generate and transport it to where it is not with minimal loss in transmission.  Clearly, New England is not where generation is easy. 

The future is solar and so was the past.  All life depends on the sun, but that will take a big improvement in Photovoltaic technology to make it truly worthwhile locally.

The future is also a "waste management issue," according to Garvin Heath, a senior scientist at the Renewable Energy Laboratory.  The panels do not have an overly long use life and then they must be disposed of and that is its own "green" issue. 

Rest assured the executives from Big Solar have no intention of helping out with that task.

The Long Hill Institute Looks at AOC and her Green New Deal

The column below appeared in the March 2019 Sturbridge Times Town & Country Magazine

We’ll Need a Lot of Green For This Deal

By Richard Morchoe

The young congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez popularly known as AOC has made quite a splash in the new Congress.  She and others aligned with her have come up with a set of proposals called The Green New Deal.

Her program could be termed secular millenarian as she wants to stop the world from ending while solving all our problems from healthcare to unemployment.

How bad is the situation?  According to AOC: “...we're like, 'The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change...?"

That her words display the usual illiteracy of generations after mine (“we’re like” might mean “we think” or “we believe,” but who knows?) should be expected.  

To be brutally bipartisan, the President will often use similarly ridiculous locutions.  

But, we digress.  The question is, who believes the dire prediction and the necessity of her program?  The agenda she is proposing consists of the following:

1. Upgrade all existing buildings
2. 100% clean power
3. Support family farms
4. Universal access to healthy food
5. Zero-emission vehicle infrastructure
6. Remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere
7. Eliminate unfair competition
8. Affordable access to electricity
9. Create high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages
10. Guaranteeing a job with a family sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement

There was one part not mentioned above that I was completely behind.  A line on her website called for supporting "economic security to all those who are unable or unwilling to work."  The Congresswoman had me at “unwilling.”  As soon as the bill was signed, your columnist would be in sloth mode for good.  Unfortunately, when people noticed that, her team did not so much walk as run it back.

It is an ambitious agenda that will take more than 12 years.  If one truly believes we have only that dozen, the reasonable course of action would be to borrow as much money as possible for the short duration left and party like it’s 2031 (i.e. 12 years hence).

The question is, is she right?  Are we really on the way to the end of existence?  We referred the question to our official think tank, The Long Hill Institute for the Study of Climate Change (LHIftSoCC for short).  After a brief deliberation, followed by a well-earned siesta, they announced a finding as follows, “Heck if we know.”

Clearly, this was not satisfactory and it was necessary to insist on some elaboration.  The institute told us that almost everyone who opines about climate change is utilizing “argument from authority.”  What that means is that just about all the partisans of human caused climate change are using the writings or publications of experts.  The opponents do the same thing.

The appeal to experts depends on both the intelligence and honesty of the savants if it is to be trusted.  AOC got the 12-year number from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which the Guardian called the world’s leading climate scientists.  Their names and credentials were not listed, but we can give them the benefit of the doubt and agree they are not dropouts from East Overshoe Junior College.

I was then stung by an accusation from the Long Hill Institute that I too used argument from authority.  Of course, they were correct. Your columnist has little access to the scholarly data and his ability to understand it limited in the sense of being non-existent.

Because the coverage of climate change is so one sided in the mainstream media, one has to search to find people who disagree with the accepted narrative.  Some of them are a bit sketchy with dubious credentials.  Thus, we have Richard Lindzen.  Lindzen is a distinguished senior fellow in the Center for the Study of Science. He is also emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT, where he was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor, beginning in 1983. Prior to that he was the Robert P. Burden Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at Harvard University.

He has other achievements, but once you know he taught at a diploma mill like MIT, who cares?

Lindzen is attacked by the proponents of the idea of human caused climate change mercilessly for disagreeing.  No matter, he is fun to listen to.  When he gets into the science, he loses me the same way his opponents do.

What’s your average walking around citizen to do, or rather believe?

Again, I must emphasize the science escapes me, but as mentioned above, it also does not adhere to almost everyone else.  I do suspect those who must use ad hominems and call their opponents names such as “deniers.”

The former Boston Globe writer Ellen Goodman started the ball rolling in 2007: “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”

In that Globe column, there was no science from the lady.  She, like the rest of us, utilized the work of others.  Goodman did make one statement that did seem original, “The certainty of the human role is now somewhere over 90 percent. Which is about as certain as scientists ever get.”

That is a bit embarrassing.  Scientists agree on the certainty of scientific laws 100%, always.  They don’t meet at conferences and say, “ya know, I’m gonna give the law of gravity a 75% today and if I’m feeling real good, a 90% tomorrow.”  Now being a generous soul, I’m not going to call Ellen out as a denier.

Again, let me emphasize that I am not a denier, I’m a don’t knower.  I trust Professor Lindzen more than others, but it is only a hunch.  As to climate change itself, I should be shocked if it did not happen, just the causes might be in question.

There is an area of the environment where I feel confidence in my opinion.  As a beekeeper, I’ve seen the struggle to keep our little friends become more difficult every year.

The link between the Monsanto pesticide glysophate and declining bee health is convincing, but here I am still taking my stand based on science promulgated by others, with the addition of personal experience.

So, I have to cut AOC some slack, though her program is impossible.

Your columnist, is however brave enough to offer AOC a bet in a sly way and is willing to wager a significant sum that we will not be dead due to environmental causes by the end of 12 years.

If I win she has to pay.  If I lose, she won’t be around to collect.