Local opposition to wind turbines and solar arrays, driven by disinformation, may be one of the biggest impediments to President Joe Biden’s battle against a burning planet.
The nation needs to quickly build out its wind, solar and smart-grid transmission infrastructure if there is any hope of meeting the Biden goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Yet, opposition to new renewable energy projects is popping up across the country, especially in the Midwest, where much of the wind energy currently turns.
Even in Iowa, which trails only Texas in wind power, new developments are being blocked by neighbors who deem them unhealthy or unsightly. In December, the Madison County, Iowa, Board of Supervisors banned any more than the 55 turbines already spinning, which effectively blocked a plan by MidAmerican Energy to install 52 new turbines. Some said gigantic towers would harm the view of the covered bridges made steamy and famous by Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood. Still, others complained of whir and flicker — could it make you go mad?
Of course not. There is no evidence to support the notion that turbines affect public health or wildlife. We know. Storm Lake is surrounded by one of the largest wind complexes in the world. President Trump, campaigning in Iowa, said the blades kill geese. Why then do goose droppings cover the sidewalk along the lakeshore? Nobody has ever seen a dead goose beneath a turbine, or a crow (hope that they might). Or a farmer set to twitching from blade shadows.
“They want to take away your energy!” Trump said over and over until you believe it.
It’s all bunk that comes from somewhere. Search and see the web of websites devoted to spreading disinformation about wind and solar. It gets into Trump’s head and comes out of his mouth, and spreads through the prairie like an autumn fire.
The kindling comes from the fact that so few rural people benefit. The landowner gets $30,000 a year, but the person living in the turbine’s shadow gets nothing. They do not feel dramatically lower electric rates. There are not enough turbine technician jobs yet to make a difference in the way people think. Carbon markets? What’s in it for the person working for $16 an hour gutting hogs? Higher gas prices for his rusting pickup, he figures. California may be burning, but he has to get to work.
The tiny Albert City-Truesdale schools run their facilities on solar now. The football field left vacant when the high school closed because of declining enrollment, now sports a $400,000 solar array that will pay for itself in a dozen years. Energy costs are rising 4% a year, while state aid to schools is increasing 1.8% per year, according to Superintendent Jeff Dicks. The school board is proud of being innovators. More will come around as they see the results.
But all around, there are skeptics — that electric car batteries will be an environmental disaster, that more acres in conservation will starve young farmers, that wind energy gets a subsidy (failing, apparently, to appreciate that our entire Persian Gulf military operation is built around protecting our vital fossil fuel supply).
The folks who feel the profit — the school superintendent who collects the property tax revenue from the extra power grid valuation, that farmer trying to buy 80 acres using a $30,000 annual wind royalty check, and the turbine repairman and wind speed technician — are all for more of it. There is plenty of room on the Great Plains and in Appalachia for investment. If it’s fracking, they’ll take it and then defend it. Presented with the figures, most stubborn Swedes can be persuaded to think with their pocketbooks. The real facts from a team of Princeton energy experts show that renewable energy can power a rural revitalization with high-paying jobs and new energy crops. But the report also notes that local opposition can short-circuit progress.
The same interests churning out the propaganda against renewable energy claimed that Obama was coming to get your guns. It’s aimed at people on edge from a system that has provided them nothing but disappointment since Eisenhower Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson told us to plant fencerow to fencerow to “feed the world.”
A starving world can be fed and powered in abundance if people believe they have a stake in what’s going on, and if the bounty is shared. All the profits flow to the power company, to the landlord in California, to the bank financing the project in Kansas City, to the Chicago Board of Trade, and none of it falls here. Just the goose poop does.
Rural people who currently are picking up guns and caravanning to the capitol might be otherwise occupied if they had something better to do. They don’t. That’s why Biden has to crank up the amperage on building out the new energy economy. In the propaganda wars, judging from action on the ground, people who think they have nothing to gain and little to lose are digging in. Bottom line: Money always wins minds and hearts. To save the planet, show them the money.
Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing as editor of his day job at The Storm Lake (Iowa) Times (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland,” recently released in paperback. Cullen can be reached at times@stormlake.com.
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2021
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