Letters to the Editor: The desert isn’t a wasteland. Destroying it for solar energy is a travesty

To the editor: Climate columnist Sammy Roth has done an admirable job explaining solar energy, but from a perspective that is fundamentally flawed. (“Nobody loves Biden’s Western Solar Plan. But it’s what we’ve got,” column, Oct. 3)

There are two kinds of environmentalists: Those who live in, say, Delaware, and those who live in the deserts of the Southwest. A perception exists among some of the former group that ridding the country of fossil fuels is worth destroying desert “wasteland.”

Those of us environmentalist types who live in that wasteland resent that viewpoint, because destruction of nature is not a path to restoring biological diversity. And there are many other steps that should be taken, among them the use of every last developed piece of land as a solar electricity generator. Rooftops (especially of mega warehouses), freeway rights-of-way, parking lot shade structures — all of these and other developed lands should be utilized to their fullest extent before any more destruction of habitat occurs.

Rooftop and parking lot structures are particularly valuable, since electricity generated at the end-use point is particularly efficient. In addition, the desert’s famous sunshine is only moderately more conducive to power generation than areas of low sunlight levels.

Figuring out ways to destroy the desert in moderation is not the way forward.

Denys Arcuri, Indio

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To the editor: Instead of putting solar panels in open land where we would have to run miles of wire to connect them to the grid, how about we mount them above the nation’s highways?

There, they would not take up raw land and would shade vehicles from the sun. There would already be infrastructure to get to them, and the hoods created by the panels could capture pollution from vehicles and improve air quality.

Don Martens, Pomona