People who live in the rural south are all a bunch of dumbasses, amirite? Did you hear about these stupid hicks who banned solar panels in their town because they think it will drain the sun? What a bunch of uneducated morons!
Figure 1. How you are imagining the entire town in question.
An article like this is one of those things that writes itself. Which is exactly why it’s untrustworthy. You know that saying about being too good to be true? This might be one of those cases.
Figure 2. How I am imagining the entire media in question.
Let’s check the source material. A city council in a town with 800 people voted 3-1 for a zoning proposal that was meant to effectively block the addition of another (sic) solar-panel array (also called a “farm”) from being built near the town. They have three already. Fucking Luddite savages. Also, because the arrays will be built outside the city limits, they will get exactly nothing in tax revenue for this.
A number of citizens expressed their objection to the addition of more arrays. One woman advocated for putting the addition of more arrays to a referendum, as opposed to a zoning policy controlled by a council. That is, she was suggesting direct democracy take precedent in their small town over representative democracy. You have an airtight solution to that dilemma–direct versus representative democracy? Yeah? Want to share that with the world? One woman complained that the town has become a “ghost town”, and alleged the arrays were contributing to decreasing property values. Okay, that’s probably a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, but at least there’s some logic to it. Redistricting land into single-use “manufacturing” zones could decrease property values. It may not be true in this instance, but that’s hardly crazy.
The next woman worried that the solar panels would block light and kill plants. Which, I mean, that’s not exactly a terribly insightful thought, sure, but it’s valid if you care about the foliage where the arrays are going up. “She also questioned the high number of cancer deaths in the area, saying no one could tell her that solar panels didn’t cause cancer.” All right, that sounds a little stupider. But this kind of worry goes around a lot. Google power lines and cancer. I mean that got debated for years even in the scientific literature. For what it’s worth, solar panels are not free of toxic chemicals. I say this not so much in support of the woman, or in opposition to solar, but I do find it annoying that just because something doesn’t emit CO2 as a direct byproduct it’s hailed as environmentally perfect. Solar has environmental drawbacks too. That doesn’t mean the trade-off isn’t worth it, but it’s important to understand that we are working with trade-offs, not prefect versus evil in the whole alternate energy debate. She finished it off with this “People come with hidden agendas,” she said. “Until we can find if anything is going to damage this community, we shouldn’t sign any paper.” Now, imagine that this wasn’t a solar company, but a fracking company. How would this story be written? What would the headlines say?
The money quote in all this was the man who “said the solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun”. And yeah, that is a stupid thing to say. But it’s possible that there’s context missing to this that makes it less insane. This man, the husband of the woman whom I quoted in the last paragraph, “said he watched communities dry up when I-95 came along and warned that would happen to Woodland because of the solar farms. ‘You’re killing your town,”’ he said. ‘All the young people are going to move out.’ He said the solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not come to Woodland.” I’m not going to defend this as definitely not stupid. But the possibility exists. It could be that he’s just inarticulate and this came out wrong. He thinks it’s economically disadvantageous, that much is clear. He may also be an idiot and think that this will literally suck up a bunch of sunlight from the town. But why did nobody who re-reported on this story bother trying to contact him to clarify? If there’s a chance that he’s not a complete moron, this whole story falls apart.
Google the articles on this. It’s the town that thinks solar panels will “suck up the sun”. Not this one guy, the whole town. And so what if this one guy does think that? Some guy who went to a city council meeting is a complete moron. There’s probably going to be some weather today, too. Anyone who ever attends meetings open to the public has heard someone with apparently no social skills say something baffling idiotic. It’s commonplace. And there’s nothing wrong with laughing about it when you get home. But that’s not what this article is all about. There’s a more malicious bait to it. Everybody is stupid but you and your circle. It’s not some random guy who’s stupid, it’s the whole town–it’s those people over there. That’s the story the media wanted to run, so that’s the story they ran; that’s the story we wanted to read, so we read it.
From a news perspective, this is more realistically “Small Town Rejects Zoning Proposal for Fourth Solar Array, Cites Lack of Clear Benefit” Would you read that? No. I wouldn’t either, and I read a lot of boring stuff. Because the actual issues at hand: how societies should rightly decide land use and how a public decides if the cost/benefit ratio of land use is worth it, are valid questions with no easy answers and no real fun in winning. It’s a boring discussion. It doesn’t allow room for feeling like you’re a good person for picking one side versus another. We don’t want to have a debate on zoning, we want to have a debate on how we’re better than other people for picking the “right” answer to the problem. We did so much better on the test than those people. Except there is no right answer at the back of the book. But that ambiguity isn’t satisfying. It’s much easier just to talk about how wrong everyone else is.