TechWalk: Solar was so ’20s

(Solar panels outside Berea Utilities plant, circa 2020)

“Woah!” Seal exclaimed. “Are those solar panels?”
“Yeah, of course,” I answered. “This is the future of power! Doesn’t everyone have them in your time?”
“No way,” Seal laughed as he peered through the fence. The iridescent panels sparkled in the midday sun, soaking up power to fuel my evening Netflix binge. “Solar was a pipe dream of the 20’s. Climate change made it pretty impossible. The atmosphere got so cloudy with dust from deforestation and ash from all the fires that it filtered most of the useful spectrum out. We use wind power mostly.”
I pondered that for a minute, watching the gleam of the panels flicker as clouds wafted overhead. The warm Kentucky autumn wind rustled the leaves of the trees around the park.
“If the sun isn’t powerful enough to use solar panels” I asked Seal, “is it still bright outside? Like it is now? Do we still have plants?”
Seal was trying to reach through the fence to touch the solar panels. I’d done the same thing, wondering if the surface was warm from the sunlight, or cool from absorbing the energy. As he smushed the side of his face against the fence to get better reach for his arm, his tinted sunglasses were pushed to the side. The gray eyes revealed behind the glasses squinted in the sunlight.

“Actually,” he said, grunting a little as he stretched out his fingers, “it’s pretty bright here. My grandma told me she remembers it being bright like this near the poles when she went on a field trip in grade school. Back then, a lot of people still had brown eyes too, like yours.”
Seal suddenly sighed and let his arm go limp. “I don’t think I can reach it.” He pull his arm back through the fence and stood up.
“So what about plants?” I asked. The ecologist people in documentaries always say that trees were our planet’s greatest assets, for oxygen, shade, food etc. Did we destroy them before we figured out how to stop polluting so much?
“We still have trees” said Seal. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Although I’ve never seen them outside like this. It’s pretty cool. Like, ‘trees in the wild.’”