Forty Acres and a Sense of Hope

Sunshine on a Cloudy Week

Pastor Jeremiah Griffin, in front of the community solar farm in Rockford Illinois that provides the power for, among other things, his family of nine kids, five of them foster children.

It’s not been my favorite stretch of American history ever, these past few weeks; indeed, the sense of impending anxious dread reminds me of of how I felt those few hours of election night 2016, except stretched out day after day. So to avoid hearing about “elites” and decline” for a few hours, I not only went to jail on Monday, I went to Illinois on Wednesday. Which was much nicer.

Indeed it was just the tonic I needed, a reminder that there’s good afoot on our planet. The words I heard the most for 24 hours were “community” and “solar,” which rank up there with “milkshake” and “lake” and “snow” on my list of happy nouns. And the people I heard them from were—well, they were elites in the best sense of the word.

Let’s begin with breakfast at the Boone County Family Diner, in Poplar Grove, Illinois. I skipped the chicken-fried steak, opting for the biscuits with peppery gravy. In the booth with me were Hal Sprague and Jon Carson of Trajectory Energy. Carson is actually the reason I was there; I’d known him in a past life, when he worked in the Obama administration and one of his jobs was dealing with environmental zealots; when I helped convince 1,254 folks to travel across the country and get arrested outside the White House to protest the Keystone pipeline, he was our designated point of contact. I don’t think he thought we’d eventually win (power is always a little doubtful about activists) but he was an absolutely honest straight-shooter, which was unusual enough in my DC experience that I kept track of him, and was delighted to learn that he’d left the Beltway to return to the midwest (fifth generation farm family) to start developing rural solar projects.

One of which we could see out the window of our booth, just across Illinois Route 173. “That’s 36 acres of panels,” Carson said. “Which means it’s enough to power about 800 homes.”

Or, let’s do the math another way. Like a high percentage of the customers of the Boone County Family Restaurant, Carson drives an F-150 Ford pickup, which has been the most popular vehicle in America for the last 47 years. But Carson drives the new Lightning version, which is an EV. About a third of the corn grown in Illinois—which has some of the very best soils on our home planet—is turned into ethanol, i.e. gasoline. “If you grow an acre of corn, it will produce 900 gallons of ethanol, which will get you about 25,000 miles for a Ford F-150 pickup,” says Carson. “Which is, not bad I guess. But let’s say we put solar on that same acre. It will produce enough electricity every year to drive my Lightning 550,000 miles.”

Another way of saying this is, a photovoltaic panel is almost astonishingly efficient—20 times more efficient than the solar collector we call a corn plant. If that wasn’t true, then we’d be in even deeper trouble on an overheating world. But it is true, which makes it our best single hope for dealing with the climate crisis. Not because you need an F-150—unless you’re a farmer, or an over-avid consumer of biscuits with gravy you probably don’t—but because that small patch of land can provide huge amounts of the energy we all use, without doing anything to raise the temperature. It’s farming the sun and producing a vast stream of electrons.

Carson and Sprague and their colleagues have been developing these projects for some years now. “Solar comes in three brackets,” Carson explained. “There’s behind the meter—that’s rooftop, for your home or business. And there’s utility scale. And then there’s community solar. We’re in the middle: 30 or 40 acres connected to the distribution grid. It allows people who can’t do rooftop solar on their home to participate.” In fact, under Illinois’ best-in-the-nation community solar laws, it allows most people to cut their bills fairly significantly by subscribing to one of these community solar projects. Poor people get a deeper discount—the Land of Lincoln is trying not just to curb the rapid rise in temperature, but also the rapid rise in inequality.

It’s not happening without opposition. Across the midwest, various groups have formed to try and block new renewable energy projects, often with at least some connection to the fossil fuel industry. Carson says that when their projects move to the zoning-permit stage, they hear four different arguments.

“The village or city might think this land could get developed, that it could be housing,” which would pay more in property tax receipts. Which is true, if there’s a market for home building there. But if there isn’t—well, the Poplar Grove project we’re looking at paid about $400 in taxes to the town when it was farmland, and now it pays about $11,000 a year, so local officials often end up supportive.

Second are the “straight up NIMBYs,” he said. “Some of the worst are progressives—they always begin by saying ‘I’m a big supporter of renewables, but not here.’”

“‘I moved out from the city to look at corn,’” says Sprague, who has clearly heard this line too often.

To deal with these objections, the Trajectory team tries to talk with every neighbor. “On this project we had one guy we could never find at home,” says Carson. “And when we had the zoning hearing there was one guy who showed up that we didn’t know, and I figured it must be him. I was sweating what he’d say. And he said ‘ever since I moved in, I’ve wondered what they were going to do with it. I’m so glad it’s solar, not a Lowe’s distribution center with lights all night and trucks backing up all day.’

Increasingly, says Carson, they’re now seeing a third category, of what might be called ‘internet nimbys.’ “The other night at a hearing we had a lady reading straight off her phone from some website. ‘Solar panels will poison the groundwater.’” We were at this point standing on Carson’s truck bed, looking out at the solar farm and the rows of corn next door. One was alive with birds and butterflies, because it’s seeded with wildflowers—great pollinator habitat. The corn stalks, those other solar collectors, occupy a biological desert, soaked with chemicals to make sure nothing else but corn grows there. As a result, high levels of nitrate foul tap water across this part of northwestern Illinois.

The fourth objection, says Carson, is in some ways the hardest: “People say ‘we’re a food producing county. This is prime farmland.” Which is true, though at the moment it’s being used for gasoline, and animal feed, almost all of which is being exported. But that argument is likely to annoy more people than it convinces—”it’s not an economic spreadsheet based discussion,” says Carson. “It’s a cultural discussion.” As it happens, communities don’t need to fear endless sheets of glass—the grid in this part of the state means that only about a hundred acres of solar panels can be built along every ten mile stretch of road. And anyway, we don’t need all that much of the landscape—remember, the solar panel is twenty times better at its job than the cornstalk.

So those are the opponents. Now meet the people who like this stuff. That picture shows a small gathering we convened at Ernie’s Midtown Pub for lunch (Wing Wednesday!) I’m on the left. Next to me is Brad Long, head of Carpenters Union Local 792 (and lead guitar for Long Shot, which plays outlaw country and acoustic blues). Then Sprague; then Keri Asevedo, who runs the local Habitat for Humanity chapter; Mike Gallagher, a community organizer; Jeremiah Griffin, a Baptist preacher; Brad Roos, head of the local environmental group; and 13th ward alderman Jeff Bailey.

After Griffin offered a grace, we went around the table. Long, the carpenter, says all the community solar farms are built with union labor—indeed, wages are about 60 percent of the cost of building one, according to Carson. “And it’s been a great thing for new apprentices—the young people are actually interested.” Asevedo has been building all-electric Habitat homes, complete with EV chargers, heat pumps, and induction cooktops. “People say, ‘we get that?’ They’re humbled, honored to be helping the planet.” Gallagher ran the numbers for his local parish when the boiler broke, arguing that solar panels on the roof would save on the $85,000 cost. Roos is hosting a solar fair next week. Alderman Bailey: “the green movement is a great tool if it’s utilized in the community. There’s a lot of money rolling down—we want to make sure those funds get in the communities that need the help.”

And then there was Griffin, the Baptist pastor. He’s got nine kids, many of them foster children, and he lives in one of the grittier parts of town. (As Roos explained, Rockford was once a showpiece of American prosperity—”during the Cuban missile crisis, they said the Russians had three targets, Washington, New York, and Rockford because we were the toolbox of the nation.” By the 1980s, though, it was turning into classic rustbelt, with unemployment rates topping 25 percent. It’s doing better now, but—well, gritty in places). I had the distinct impression there are things I would disagree with Griffin about, like who should be president, or the role of guns in our society. But I liked him enormously, and could tell he was a Christian in the actual sense of the word, deeply devoted to his neighbors. And man did he like solar power. In fact, after lunch we adjourned to the former Rockford landfill, which Trajectory developed into a ten-acre solar farm.

“This was a quarry where people would just come and push whatever they wanted in,” he said, as we took in the sweeping view from this high point in the city. “I’d come up here and pray for the city And it was in the middle of a gang shooting at the time. And now to be here is the exact opposite.”

When, over breakfast, we’d talked about the opposition to the solar projects, Carson said it could often be overcome. “It’s less about the message than the messenger,” he said. “If it’s someone people trust.” Later in the day Sprague and I drove out to Griffin’s church. From the parking lot you could see a large cornfield. It might have been used for housing, but limestone beneath means the soil won’t pass a perc test. It might have been used for some parking lots—there’s a giant Walmart a quarter mile the other way. But it’s going to be a solar farm instead.

In other energy and climate news

+India is probably the most important battleground on earth for renewable energy development, because it’s just now hitting the sharp upward turn in consumption that China saw twenty years ago. And with suddenly cheap solar energy, it could become the first great economic power that avoided at least some of the fossil fuel trap. Signs are…not bad, according to the Hindu newspaper

Solar remains the mainstay of the renewable new capacity addition and it added about 3.7 GW during Q1 of this fiscal, while the wind power segment added 770 MW of new capacity. During the first quarter of last fiscal, the wind energy sector added a new capacity of 1.1 GW, about 1/4th of the overall new capacity added to the grid during the period. 

+The new Republican platform, drafted in anticipation of next week’s convention, doesn’t even mention climate change. As Prem Thakker reports:

The document paid no mind to environmental protection, never mind the 130 million Americans currently trudging through oppressive heat. But it did call to “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY,” a reference to Israel’s U.S.-funded defense system, and to “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”

That the Trump-led, Republican agenda doesn’t mention “climate” is not surprising. In his first term, the former president overturned some 100 environmental regulations, pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and weakened the Environmental Protection Agency. In April, Trump reportedly promised oil tycoons that he would reverse some of Joe Biden’s climate policies in exchange for a $1 billion campaign contribution. Meanwhile, three of his Supreme Court justices just helped corporate America get even further off the hook from having to respect environmental regulation by overturning the Chevron doctrine, a decades-old legal precedent that directed courts to defer to federal agencies’ interpretation of unambiguous statues. 

“Trump can’t mention it because every last one of his policies would make it worse. He’s essentially running on heating the planet even more,” Bill McKibben, environmentalist and founder of climate groups Third Act and 350.org, told The Intercept.

+A great loss to the community of organizers this week, when Jane McAlevey died at 59. As the Times said in her obituary

After leading successful campaigns for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the Service Employees International Union from 1997 to 2008, Ms. McAlevey transitioned to consulting, coaching labor groups across the country on how to energize the rank and file, attract new members and fight off employers’ aggressive anti-union tactics.

She also worked with immigrant rights organizations, tenant groups and climate activists and traveled internationally, advising German hospital unions, Irish communications workers and labor organizers in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.

A magnetic speaker with a dry sense of humor, Ms. McAlevey expanded her global reach in 2019. She led a free, intensive six-week online course, “Organizing for Power,” at the Berlin-based Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, a democratic socialist nonprofit. Over four years, 36,000 people in 130 countries logged onto the workshops, which were simultaneously translated into a dozen languages, including Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese and Russian.

She also drew about 4,500 participants over four years to workshops at the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center, where she was a senior policy fellow. In 2022, United Food and Commercial Workers local No. 770, a large Southern California union, sent 100 members and staffers to the workshops as it prepared to bargain with grocery chains, the group’s president, Kathy Finn, said.

As a result, the union opened staff-led negotiations to rank and file workers. The transparency led to “huge numbers of members voting to strike,” Ms. Finn said, a turnout that elicited corporate concessions, averting a walkout at the last minute. “More and more unions are using her tactics,” she said.

+Another American well worth listening to is the wonderful Joanna Macy, who’s been “a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology who has been working for peace, justice, and the preservation of life on Earth for seven decades.” With Jessica Serrante, she’s featured in a wonderfully useful new podcast, “We Are the Great Turning.”

+Christian Shepherd and Lyric Li have a powerful account in the Washington Post of how China is rightly freaking out about the impact of climate change across the nation, with officials working hard to help speed adaptation efforts in waterlogged and overheated cities.

After decades of campaigning by climate activists that was largely ignored, Beijing has made adapting to bouts of extreme weather a greater policy priority. Last week, weather officials issued an unusually direct warning about the country’s vulnerability to intensifying heat and rainfall worsened by climate change.

A month earlier, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment had released its first progress report on adaptation to the threat of climate change, which highlighted the need for better early-warning systems and improved coordination among departments in charge of construction, water management, transportation and public health.

“When these departments are siloed off, it impedes a systematic response to climate,” said Liu Junyan, a Beijing-based campaigner for the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace. “We can’t miss the big picture because we’re all tucked away in different corners putting out our own crises.”

This coordination, Liu said, will be key to saving lives during this year’s floods, as will improving advanced notice for residents in the remote and mountainous countryside, where mitigation work remains weak.

Forecasts for the rest of July underscore a sense of urgency: Torrential rain is expected in 18 regions across the country. The government has sent in hundreds of soldiers, relocated tens of thousands of villagers, and allocated $200 million to aid disaster relief.

+A detailed new report from the NGO InfluenceMap shows that fossil fuel industry has been working off the same playbook since the 1960s

Three distinct narratives can be traced across 51 separate instances of the associations’ advocacy against fossil fuel alternatives between 1967 and 2023. These narratives include “Solution Skepticism,” which has been in use for 56 years, “Policy Neutrality” for 34 years, and “Affordability and Energy Security” for 51 years. Despite advancements in understanding the threats posed by the climate crisis, these narratives persist as of 2023. They represent a continuation of historical climate science denial tactics that have been prevalent within the fossil fuel industry, as documented by Inside Climate News and research published in Nature Climate Change.

+Want to understand why “carbon capture and storage” at fossil fueled power plants is a colossal waste of time and money (better spent on building more renewables)? Check out this new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis

CCS involves capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from oil and gas reservoirs or large industrial sources and storing them underground to prevent their release. Many oil and gas companies cite CCS as a key part of their strategy to reduce emissions and achieve net zero, over varying time periods. However, for oil and gas extractors it only means burying a small proportion of their total emissions from each gas or oil field.

For gas companies, CCS means removing the CO2 contained in the gas field; this is known as Scope One emissions and often represents well under 10% of the total emissions associated with each gas project. It rarely involves the burying of Scope Two emissions, which is the CO2 created when gas is processed at the downstream gas plant, cleaning it up by removing impurities such as CO2 and nitrogen, before it is sold on the domestic market, or chilled to create liquefied natural gas (LNG) for shipping to global export markets.

The majority of GHG emissions from gas projects are created when the gas is combusted or burnt by consumers for heating or cooking, as a feedstock for industry, or generating electricity. None of these emissions, categorised as Scope Three, are captured by CCS facilities, and they represent around 90% of the emissions from a gas project.

Essentially, CCS is being used as a way to boost oil and gas production, legitimised by the claim that it is all in the pursuit of lower emissions. The net zero targets for fossil fuel companies are largely confined to Scope One and Two emissions, with Scope Three excluded even though it accounts for the majority of the emissions from every oil and gas project.

+J.A. Ginsburg offers a hopeful account of a restored forest on Hawaii’s Big Island.

The Lee family had their work cut out for them and no playbook to follow. The sandalwood forest they remembered had been clear-cut to create a cattle ranch. Instead of trees, the landscape was covered in kikuyu grass brought in from Africa to feed livestock brought in from California. Meanwhile, mongooses imported during the 18th century to rid sugar plantations of rats spread to many of the islands, including the Big Island. There they decimated—and continue to decimate—native wildlife. Several bird species have been driven to extinction. But rats, which are nighttime marauders, continue to thrive. It turns out, mongooses hunt during the day.

Halfway up the mountain on this side of the Big Island is a “dryland,” which means there is no irrigation. That wasn’t a problem when the annual rainfall tallied 40 inches. But turning a forest into a grassland broke the natural water cycle. The grass dried out and became easy tinder for fires. Topsoil, always thin on a volcanic island, eroded, leaving the land scarred.

Gay and I drove up the mountain on a one lane road past feral goats (another legacy of Captain Cook), through two sets of electric gates, the vast Pacific Ocean disappearing in the rearview mirror. Then suddenly there it was, a thriving sandalwood and koa forest, lush and green. A small dog, a self-appointed greeter, could barely contain his excitement announcing our arrival.

+A Nantucket beach vacation home valued at $1.9 million recently sold for $200,000 because of “extreme erosion.” Maybe that will get the attention of some of the powerful!