The front line in America’s struggle for a carbon-free future is a postage stamp of a southwestern Pennsylvania municipality — a place that has no traffic lights, no restaurants, no post office.
Almost no one in Washington County’s Jefferson Township, population 1,326, will say they oppose green energy. They’re just against the proposed 1,000-acre solar farm — the equivalent of 758 football fields — that developers want to build in an agricultural and wooded pocket featuring greeting card vistas of gravel roads and fields fragrant with new mown hay.
“It’s beautiful and it’s not going to be beautiful,” said Emily Waters, 34, who with her husband, 38-year-old Daniel and 7-year-old daughter Sawyer, live in a house they built three years ago in Jefferson. “It’s what we love out here. It’s slowly being stripped away from us.”
And they don’t see much benefit in return.
“Are we getting lower electricity…
