Last month, over an incredibly bleak $140 sea bass at a COP28 side-gala in Dubai, a high-ranking United Nations climate envoy leaned across the linen tablecloth and asked me where I found my hope. I looked him dead in the eye, took a sip of a sustainably sourced Pinot Grigio, and told him the absolute truth. I told him I do not look to the Paris Agreement. I do not look to Kyoto, or Geneva, or the desperate, failing pledges of the European Union. I look to Justice. Specifically, Justice, Illinois. The envoy wept, though in retrospect he may have just been calculating his personal carbon footprint after flying private from Davos. But my point stands. While the international community squabbles over stranded assets and net-zero timelines, the true crucible of the energy transition is quietly unfolding on the unglamorous outskirts of Chicago.
For years, the environmental left has fundamentally misunderstood the American psyche. We have asked voters to sacrifice. We have asked them to look at majestic fields of wheat, or rolling pastoral hills, and imagine them paved over with hideous, gleaming photovoltaic arrays. Mayor Krzysztof Wasowicz of Justice understands what the coastal elites do not. He has bravely voiced the silent, profound fear of the American heartland: that traditional solar farms will gobble up our precious agricultural land and funnel our hard-earned municipal dollars directly to the Chinese manufacturing sector.
It is a bold, undeniably correct stance. Why should we sacrifice the soil that grows our high-fructose corn syrup just to keep the lights on? Why should we surrender our pastoral heritage to the aggressive glare of the sun? Wasowicz has found the elegant, uniquely American loophole. He has championed a massive community solar array deployed exactly where it belongs, and exactly where it harms no one: on the sprawling, otherwise utterly useless roof of a local Public Storage facility.
We do not need to choose between saving the biosphere and hoarding the detritus of our broken consumer lives. We can do both. The unused roof space above hundreds of windowless, corrugated metal lockers containing old NordicTracks, boxes of Beanie Babies, and the emotional baggage of a thousand suburban divorces is the exact foundation upon which we will build our sustainable future.
Let that sink in.
The synergy we are seeing here is frankly staggering, as we are generating clean, renewable energy directly above units containing nothing but seasonal patio furniture and vague regret.
It is an absolute masterstroke of municipal land use. Think of the scope-three emissions we are avoiding by simply leaving the natural landscape alone and letting the self-storage industry do the heavy lifting. The sheer square footage of climate-controlled anxiety in this country is our greatest untapped natural resource. Every time an American family refuses to throw away a broken jet ski or a mothballed dining room set, they are effectively building the infrastructure for a greener grid.
When I presented this model at a panel on suburban sustainability in Geneva last spring, the reception was predictably chilly. Some European technocrat had the audacity to suggest that perhaps the proliferation of endless self-storage facilities was, in itself, a symptom of an unsustainable culture of hyper-consumption. Well, keep trying to solve the crisis by asking people to buy fewer things. That has clearly worked so well for us.
These people do not understand that the transition must meet people where they are. And where the American consumer currently resides is paying $149 a month to keep a purgatorial collection of college textbooks in a state of suspended animation. If we cannot power the future using the flat, tar-papered surfaces that shield our forgotten junk from the elements, then we do not deserve a future at all.
The brilliance of the Public Storage model is that it entirely bypasses the moral complexities of the natural world. A forest is complicated. A wetland is fraught with endangered species, shifting water tables, and deeply annoying local activists. But a single-story cinderblock rectangle containing a 2004 Honda Civic that hasn't started in a decade? That is an ecological blank canvas. It is a dead zone that we can finally bring back to life through the magic of municipal tax credits.
We initially looked at putting the panels on the local high school, but the roof was full of HVAC units and, frankly, education is a declining industry with terrible margins.
Critics, of course, will claim this is merely a distraction. They will argue that the energy required to manufacture the endless torrent of plastic consumer goods stored inside these facilities far outweighs the trickle of clean electricity generated on the roof. They will point out that we are still driving massive, gas-guzzling SUVs to these storage units on the weekends just to retrieve our artificial Christmas trees.
I say to them: perfect is the enemy of the good. The Mayor of Justice has looked at the bleak, unyielding reality of the American landscape and decided to work with the clay he was given. If we must pave over the earth with concrete slabs to house our surplus blenders, let us at least put a community solar array on top of the pavement.
In fact, I am prepared to take the Justice model to its logical conclusion. We should be aggressively zoning for more Public Storage. We should be bulldozing the very farmland Mayor Wasowicz is trying to protect, not to build standalone solar farms, but to build vastly more self-storage units, which we can then blanket with solar panels. We are currently facing a critical shortage of flat, windowless roofs, and the only way to solve it is to encourage citizens to buy more things they do not need.
Honestly, if we stack the storage units three stories high, we double the solar catchment area while simultaneously providing a secure, climate-controlled environment for the inevitable climate refugees to keep their golf clubs.
It is a paradigm shift of the highest order. The environmental movement has spent decades trying to make humans consume less. It has been a colossal, humiliating failure. The Justice protocol recognizes that human consumption is the only constant we have left. The more useless garbage we buy, the more storage units we will need to house it, and the more flat, unshaded roof space we will create for the solar panels that will power the factories churning out more useless garbage.
It is a beautiful, self-sustaining loop. A closed-circle economy of pure, unadulterated American denial.
Next month, I am scheduled to address a working group at the EPA regarding municipal land-use strategies for the upcoming decade. I will not be bringing them charts of sea-level rise or projections of ocean acidification. I will be bringing them a promotional brochure from the Justice, Illinois Public Storage facility, featuring a promotional rate of just one dollar for the first month.
The old environmentalism is dead. It died in the majestic, unprofitable forests and the politically toxic fields of grain. The new environmentalism lives in the suburbs, behind a chain-link fence, accessible only via a personalized gate code. I, for one, have already reserved my unit.