Link: https://heated.world/p/the-influencer-teaching-millions

Alexandra Fasulo says she’s protecting farms and wildlife. Her campaign is becoming a blueprint for the fossil fuel right.

if only the atmospheric carbon would go underground as easily as my hope in humanity.

Her issue seems to be solar shouldn't disrupt nature, which is true.

We need to be installing it over carparks, buildings, and maybe even roads.

The problem is we're still letting private corporations plan the rollout, and they're gonna go for where it's cheapest, which is undeveloped land.

You're arguing in good faith. Which, good, don't let them take that earnest attitude. But she is not.

She is getting paid to spread disinformation. Whatever actual misconceptions were there to begin, are probably now tied with deception and inseparable. Getting paid to lie makes it really easy to lie to yourself too.

Farm land is not nature.

An otherwise undisturbed meadow below solar panels is more biodiversity and better for nature than the monoculture with pesticides that were there before.

If the solar panels are build on truly undeveloped land, than OK, that should not happen, I agree.

Farm land is not nature

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

Or did you have a dream last night that I said something stupid and now you're mad at me?

No, I was just replying to what I'm seeing mostly in my surrounding: solar farms being built on what was farm land before.

As I said, if it was truly nature before, then I agree with you.

No reason to assume she's getting paid. Plenty of people are just ignorant and angry. There's a coalition of Upstate NY farmers screeching like banshees about how NY agriculture is being sold up the river to support valueless clean energy initiatives. They're all over the local news and town halls and city councils.

Never mind that only about 0.3% of NY's arable farmland has been converted to solar, or that moving to clean energy is essential to curb climate change that is literally right now, this week, flooding NY farms and destroying crop yields.

Classic Hanlon's razor stuff.

Thanks for pointing this out.

It is worth noting that many of these farmers also have a material and financial interest in continuing fossil fuel dependency, as many of their corn crops go to biofuel in ethanol.

No reason to assume she's getting paid. Plenty of people are just ignorant and angry.

In the individual I agree, but when it becomes an obvious astroturf process juiced up by rightwing nutjobs who own the platforms than that is different, hence why I put my effort in here and not those places.

Relevant open access research on this

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261926006604

Most studies, however, tried to capture direct impacts of solar PV sites on biodiversity through field measurements, but even within these, methodological approaches varied considerably. For example, while many studies used the surrounding landscape as the control site [e.g. [56], [59], [65], [75]], others assessed biodiversity only within solar PV sites, using areas between panels or next to panels as control [e.g. [77], [91], [92]. Although such within-site comparison can provide useful insights into the effects of shading or altered water patterns on soil organisms or plants, from a life cycle perspective it is desirable to take the nearby (semi-)natural environment as a control environment to be able to make conclusions on the potential loss of biodiversity. An alternative approach would be to measure biodiversity levels before installation and again some years after [e.g. 104].

Additionally, while it is important to understand the benefits solar PV sites can provide compared to, for example, intensely managed agricultural sites [e.g. [75], there is still the need for a standardised control condition across biodiversity assessments. For this reason, LCIA methods typically use a (semi-)natural reference landscape as the control condition, ensuring that the impacts of any land-use type can be assessed against a common baseline.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666683926000787

also relevant https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/05/18/spain-france-set-benchmark-in-renewables-expansion-without-biodiversity-loss/

The real problem with solar rn (esp in USA) is the fact they are building solar farms not for Net Zero, but to fuel AI Data Centers. The tech bros are accelerating our demise.

When the AI bubble bursts, the solar farms will be useful for better things.