When Cars Behave Like Teenagers. Greenhouses versus Solar Farms.

The big new solar farm as seen from Blackwell Side Road, Sarnia, Ontario.

by Louis B. Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved

It all began innocently enough...

Sometimes when I’m bored, I bring up my Google page and click on the upper left-hand corner where it says, ‘maps.’ I got hooked on it after seeing the shipwrecks off of Canatara Beach.
One day I was hovering above the Earth a hundred kilometres up. That’s when I discovered the mysterious lines at Nazca in Peru aren’t actually visible from space. So that blows that theory all to hell.
I was looking down at Point Pelee, around Wheatley, and Rondeau; and I noticed something funny. They build huge greenhouses down there, all metal tubes and heavy plastic. They show up from a certain altitude. They’re absolutely huge, covering hundreds of hectares. This struck me for two reasons. One, a few years ago, I worked in Blenheim, and so I got to see one under construction over a number of days, weeks and months. Secondly, I drove past the solar farm they’re developing in the southeast corner of Sarnia, Ontario. That’s at the intersection of Churchill Line and Blackwell Side Road, east of Highway 40.
That place is pretty sprawling, and they’re not making any new farmland these days.

My question is pretty simple.

Is it more efficient to burn farmland to make electricity, or is it more efficient to turn that exact same solar energy, i.e. solar-heating hours, into food? This would save transportation emissions, wouldn’t it? And those greenhouses create jobs over the long term and everything, right? It’s not just a quick flash in the pan for local construction workers. Although I admit they get that too from the greenhouses. No one is actually against jobs these days, although there may be other considerations from time to time. Species-survival might be one. Politicians need to get out into the real world once in a while.
It actually makes more sense for individual homeowners to have solar panels on the roof. Point of consumption is point of production. Infrastructure is cellular, and hard to knock out all at once--it's terror- proof in some degree.
No one ever listens to me...fools! Fools! But that way no rich people would get richer. That’ll never happen. It would be, ‘politically unpopular.’ For the people to control the means of production is sacrilegious to capitalists and Canadian politicians, and the mainstream corporate media.
Governments would rather subsidize big, sexy projects that get lots of media attention; but really don’t amount to much in the long run. Because we don’t have enough farmland, for all of our power consumption needs. Some people object to wind turbines, but at least you can still grow crops on the land below them.
They say Toyota has a hydrogen fuel-cell powered car coming along soon. They’re working out a few bugs. The cars have a bad habit of waiting until the owner goes to sleep and then taking off and gallivanting all over town, kind of like horny teenagers.
For some reason wind power is less attractive. People object to the noise! One lady objected to the Ontario Municipal Board regarding 'noise from transformers.' This one was about the solar farm! She lost the case.
Perhaps one system is simply more efficient than another, or something. We may get 300 wind turbines in Lambton County, but we are definitely getting two more solar farms. The contracts are all signed, sealed and delivered according to credible sources.
Also, locally two closed former landfill sites have been tapped for methane-into-power projects. These also required large investments of capital and 'a stable price.'
In order to get these projects off the ground, certain cooperation was required. The Ontario authorities, 'Big Hydro,' recently privatized, had to sign an agreement to buy the juice at something on the order of forty-three cents per kilowatt/hour. This is way more than consumers are willing to pay. They will never see it expressed in those terms on their hydro bill. It will be a 'blended' pricing structure. So there is a subsidy. It's not a 'free market economy.' The same holds true whether you are building a solar farm, or taking methane from an old landfill site.
So the big question is when will some forward-looking individuals get together and invest in local food production? I'm referring to 'truck gardening,' using solar energy, greenhouses, and some kind of government cooperation.
In my opinion, this would create permanent jobs of the so-called 'green' type, although the liklihood is the employees would still have to drive to work...and most of those people would like to own a house. The older homes, in the lower price ranges, really aren't that energy efficient.
Some of them have no insulation in the walls whatsoever, and are running fifty or eighty year-old furnaces. Some of them still have old-fashioned aluminum sash, single pane window systems, and bad doors as well. What is needed is an overall, coordinated strategy, which is just what we aren't going to get from the government of Stephen Harper. That's because he's so hung up on selling tar sands oil to the U.S. Yet ultimately, that will leave as much of an environmental impact as the big BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The only real difference, in the Gulf states, millions of people make a living from the sea. In Canada's north, only a few tens of thousands of politically-naive people make any kind of a living from the land.
The environmental impact is a well-kept secret. In Canada, the big oil companies, the federal and provincial governments, and the big media concerns cooperate quite a bit. They seem to think Canadians should be treated like mushrooms, 'kept in the dark and fed nothing but crap.'
So I guess the last thing I need to worry about is what sort of trouble my new car may be getting into. Anyway, you get what you pay for. Right?
Welcome to the twenty-first century.

(Note: The odds of us getting a new car anytime soon, seem very, very slim. -ed.)