NIMBY. Have you heard the acronym? It stands for 'Not In My Back Yard'. The concept has been around forever, and no doubt you've experienced some form of it; perhaps when the neighbor added a new lawn decoration you dislike, or the open lot next door was developed into condos.
The latest form of NIMBY-ism in Wisconsin is the opposition to solar farms. Swaths of Wisconsin farmland are being converted from crops (most often corn) to large tracts of solar panels. This has provoked the considerable and classic outcry 'Won't someone please think of the farmers!', or 'How will we feed the nation without our crops?'
A dirty little secret about the cornfields you're looking at: 25% of all corn produced goes to ethanol, not to your dinner plate; nationwide, that number is more like 45%.
Ethanol is a biofuel, yes, and perhaps 'cleaner' to burn for energy and is useful as a fuel additive. However, once you factor in all energy inputs on a cornfield from growing, harvesting, processing, and transportation, and compare them to energy inputs required to build and maintain a solar farm (as a recent study from the advocacy group Clean Wisconsin did), the output from a solar farm can produce 100x more energy on a comparable size of land compared to a cornfield.
Energy security, reduced emissions, and more productive use of our local land? All I have to say to that is YIMBY - Yes In My Back Yard.
