Dom Tristram's Soapbox

Solar Farms


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Transcript:

One of the current bugbears of the Right seems to be solar farms, because obviously they don’t like the idea of energy we make ourselves cheaply. Their main criticism seems to be about the “good quality agricultural land” that’s going to be “wasted”. There’s lots of reasons to argue against that - you can still use the land for agriculture - but there’s one thing I wanted to flag up: solar farms are about 0.1% of land.

Now, there’s something that’s very elitist, and used by very few people, that’s also using agricultural land… but 20 times more than solar farms. Can you think of what that might be? It’s not making clean energy. It’s used almost exclusively by very wealthy people and not very often.

I’ll tell you what it is - golf courses. Golf courses take up about 2% of the land in England completely unproductively.

So, consider what it is you really are objecting to when you’re objecting to solar farms, because to be consistent you should be objecting 20 times more to golf courses.



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Dom Tristram's SoapboxBy Dom Tristram