Opiniatrety

How Big Is Connecticut?

[vaguely political stuff moved under the jump to make room for the philosophy/linguistics post just below]

In the third part of her New Yorker "Climate of Man" series--unfortunately not online, and my paper copy isn't hear--Elizabeth Kolbert talks about the prospects for cutting fossil fuel consumption by using solar power. She arrives at the sobering conclusion that, in order to cut consumption by a certain amount, we'd need solar panels covering a land mass the size of Connecticut.

At least, it's supposed to be sobering--and if you're in New York City, that seems like a huge amount of land. But look at the US. Connecticut--that's the pink one just above NYC (which NOAA seems to think is on Long Island, but never mind)--is not very big as the country goes. In particular, I understand that there's a lot of fairly uninhabited land in Texas, say between San Antonio and El Paso. I know there's a lot of fairly uninhabited land in western Nebraska, because I've driven across it. You could fit a few Connecticuts in there. And both places are flat, and Texas at least gets a lot of sunshine.

I'm not saying it would be easy to set up huge solar farms here--people own the land and would need to be bought out, probably. But, if we're faced with something as grave as the threat of global warming, we may need to do something drastic. A big government-led program to increase solar energy doesn't seem ridiculous. And I just don't see the argument that there's not enough land. Maybe Europe doesn't have enough land, but the U.S. has quite a lot of land that is underutilized. (And developing the land into solar farms could lead to jobs for the people living there; I'm not trying to be completely callous about the red states.)