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Dave Pearson's avatar

North Northamptonshire Council refused to approve the solar farm "due to the impact on the landscape and loss of habitat", but they need to consider the impact of the climate and ecological crises if we don't significantly reduce burning gas to generate electricity. The solar farm company says it will save around 21,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.

As for it being built on "valuable agricultural land", it’s better to have 0.6% of our land impacted by solar farms than 100% of our land impacted by extreme weather caused by the climate crisis. Currently solar farms occupy less than 0.1% of the UK’s land. To meet the government’s net zero target, the Climate Change Committee estimates that we will need 70GW of solar by 2035 and 90GW by 2050. That would mean solar farms would at most account for approximately 0.6% of UK land – less than the amount currently occupied by golf courses. Once we’ve built the solar farms that we need we’ll still have 99.4% of land left for farming.

The statement from STAUNCH that the land is "linked to" the Special Protection Area sounds disingenuous. If it were in the SPA then they'd say so. It sounds like nimbyism.

Decades ago our options were between a good future and a bad future. We had decades of time in which to switch away from hydrocarbon fuels and enter into a good future. But our spineless politicians didn't want to make the hard decisions and just kicked the climate can down the road. Today our options are between a bad future and a catastrophic future. Our politicians should be making the hard choices to rapidly decarbonise our economies and move us towards the bad outcome, but they still haven't discovered a backbone. A rapid and radical decarbonisation will cause "impact on the landscape and loss of habitat", but at this point it's the least bad option.

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