Hadley Planning Board member Michael Sarsynski is a public servant doing his job.
He told the Gazette last month that his town, long the Valley’s home of suburban sprawl amid some of the richest farmland in the region, will not play the role of eyesore (“Solar plan gets cold reception,” Feb. 22). To make his point, he quotes Joni Mitchell’s song “Big Yellow Taxi.” Who would dare pave paradise and put up a parking lot? Certainly not Hadley.
The development he’s resisting — while also sneering at what he calls “so-called climate change” — is a proposed Eversource solar energy farm. Even setting aside the overwhelming scientific case for manmade climate change, solar power is an economic engine to reckon with.
In many parts of the country, solar is cheaper than fossil-generated electricity, whether via coal or natural gas. As the technology steadily improves, the bottom-line case for solar only strengthens. So, already there are twice as many jobs nationwide tied to solar energy production as there are for coal. And the size and number of solar installations around the country have lately been doubling every two years, putting it on a rapid growth curve like the adoption of the smartphone in the early 2010s.
There’s plenty of land to build solar farms on, even in Hadley. But getting the word out at this early stage about the solar juggernaut can be challenging, especially in today’s distracted media environment. So Sarsynski should continue fighting visual blight in his town, as well as the developments he apparently thinks are tied to “so-called climate change.” And whatever the case, he should keep getting quoted in the newspaper. He’s doing more good than he realizes.
Mark Anderson
Easthampton