Dear President Trump,

I honestly haven’t checked the internet to if this idea is out there already, so I’m not saying this is original. In fact, I hope it already is out there so more people get on board as soon as possible. Bear with me, sir (that means be patient, I’ll get to the point eventually).

Mr. Trump, you’re going on national TV tonight, presumably to say something-or-other about building a southern border wall. I’d like to go on record in opposition to your wall. The wall would be inefficient. The wall would be ineffective. And the wall would be immoral.

Instead, I propose that we take every last penny (those are the tiny bronze ones) you want to spend on the wall and invest them in the rapid development and deployment of alternative energy generation. To be more specific, it should all be spent on solar power.

The Sun is the source of all energy on this planet, one way or another. “We are all made of stars,” as Herman Melville or somebody once put it. Let me give you a for instance:

The Sun blasts out photons– which are, like, the tiny little things that light is made of– and the photons get absorbed by plants, the plants get eaten by animals, and the animals die and decompose and eventually turn into fossil fuels like oil. I’m glossing over and perhaps completely misstating some details, but that’s OK because you’re used to it and this is the internet. Converting photons into 87 octane takes a bazillion years, is essentially non-reversible unless they invent replicators like on Star Trek, and is just plain dirty.

So we must develop solar power as quickly and as bigly as possible. It is faster, more renewable, and cleaner than relying on those filthy, very dirty, very environmentally very bad fossil fuels. Sure, we’re still working on making the batteries and the panels, but this is America and we’re going to get Elon Musk and Bill Gates, great guys as you know, working on a solution. Great guys. The best guys.

So we should invest many, many billions of dollars and other monies in massive solar farms, and build them as quickly as we can. To get as much energy as possible, the solar panels need to be huge. Let’s say at least 50 feet tall. That is, the solar part itself should be 50 feet tall, the whole thing would have to be taller so you could plant it firmly in the ground. To catch as many photons as possible, the solar panels would have to be side-by-side, with virtually no gaps between them. For this to be useful, and to speed up the switch to solar energy, we would need probably need 3,000 miles or so of these panels, and place them in the most solar-friendly parts of the country. I took the following screenshot from the US Department of Energy’s really cool Solar Energy Potential website:

I say build the farms in southern California, southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, and southern Texas, along the northern side of that orange and yellow line. And given that these farms are going to lead us into a clean, efficient, environmentally safe future, we need to protect the farms. No unauthorized walking across the farms, no digging under the panels, and definitely no climbing on the panels. We can’t afford to have them scratched, because they don’t make Gorilla Glass that big. In fact, we should probably fence off the farms and bring in some federal agents to guard them.

Of course, people could still legally walk between these solar farms using officially designated roads, bridges, and so on.

So President Trump, don’t waste our hard-earned money on a useless, inefficient boondoggle like a wall. Instead, please invest that money in solar farms. We must do it for the environment. We must do it for America. And we must do it for the children.

Just make sure those farms are big and beautiful.

Sincerely,

Vincent D. Viscariello