Green Energy Is Destroying the Best Landscapes

I’ve spent a few days driving through the rural northwest of Spain. I hadn’t visited some of those villages for so many years that I could hardly recognize them. Returning to the places where you spent your childhood has a remarkable way of accelerating the appearance of gray hairs and the onset of aches and pains. The countryside remains rural, but it now coexists with strange new technologies. Life is more comfortable there now, they tell me, although people miss a certain degree of privacy. The roads are better, and things like Google Maps allow any idiot to reach villages that were once almost inaccessible.

My real problem is the landscape. Why on earth should I accept that those enormous fields and those verdant mountains that look almost Irish are now riddled with what they call solar farms?

That’s why they call them “solar farms” instead of “disgusting energy industries made of ugly panels.”

The Left has always been much better at naming things than the Right. Conservatives, generally speaking, don’t need new names for old things. The Left, and especially the climate Left, does, because it isn’t merely trying to define something precisely; it is trying to position it ideologically in your subconscious. That’s why they call them “solar farms” instead of “disgusting energy industries made of ugly panels,” which would be a much more accurate definition.

In southern Galicia, a land of vineyards and great wines, these horrible solar panels have arrived too, lined up by the hundreds, disrupting the natural landscape, disturbing wildlife, and destroying vegetation. To make them sound more palatable, in Spanish they are called “solar gardens,” giving an eco-friendly touch to what is essentially a disgusting industrial installation, forcibly planted in the middle of beautiful natural landscapes. Europeans have spent a century passing laws to protect parks, natural areas, and everything that constitutes particularly sensitive natural heritage, only to end up planting solar panels and wind turbines as if they were planting lettuce. Everything the political elites in Brussels touch seems to rot. (RELATED: Is Climate Change Destroying the Environment?)

In contemporary debates, it is often unnecessary to delve into the heart of the matter or the deeper reasons. There is an aesthetic argument, apparently superficial but invincible: who can honestly claim that we are saving the planet by destroying these beautiful landscapes and cutting open mountains to install energy infrastructure, enormous masses of steel, and countless cables? (RELATED: Green Energy Reels From Major Defeats, but the Battle Continues)

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Many of these solar arrays are installed on former farmland. Large corporations, encouraged and subsidized by governments and the EU, have gone from house to house in rural villages, looking for uninformed farmers and offering them vast sums of money in exchange for the right to destroy their orchards and land and turn them into energy installations. Many have accepted the offer because, after all, it guarantees them an income for decades. In return, they no longer have to work the land or maintain it to reduce the risk of fires. It is perhaps the most perverse form of bureaucracy we have ever seen. (The EU’s Most Successful Startup Is the Fine Department)

Some argue that the arrival of the railroad (I am thinking of the Wild West) worked in a similar way, expropriating land and transforming landscapes and ways of life. Frankly, the railroad had a purpose. It was never sold on the emotional argument that it was going to save the planet, and it also increased the value of the land it crossed. The usefulness of solar farms and wind power is much more debatable. The emotional argument about saving the planet is, in many cases, a damned deception designed to beguile people with little knowledge of how these systems actually work. And aesthetically, while the railroad brought a new kind of beauty, pastures and fields transformed into enormous rechargeable batteries are an affront to the eye — and a symptom of the decadence of a civilization that approves of anything the Left dictates.

I will continue traveling through these lands whenever I can because, despite everything, the beauty of those thousands of olive trees, country houses, and quiet corners surrounded by nothing but nature remains incredible, and almost impossible to find in the big city. And how delicious the wine is!

But I hate that half of the West has destroyed its extraordinarily rich rural landscape to satisfy the destructive appetite of a handful of idiots who, in many cases, are getting rich in the process. Another day we’ll talk about how so-called “green” energy (another example of the Left twisting language to mold public opinion) is translating into lucrative opportunities for political corruption. I don’t even want them to return the money stolen from the people anymore. It would be enough if they took their useless machinery and installed it in the damned gardens of their mansions, so that we can once again feel like the heirs to a natural paradise, not a landscape expropriated and littered with electronic junk.