A key climate question: Are wind farms ugly or beautiful?

This is the May 27, 2021, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Several folks made comparisons to fossil fuels, with one person posting a definitely-not-pretty photo of an oil refinery and another writing that “poor aesthetics of renewable energy facilities is a misinformation campaign perpetuated by oil and gas advocates.” I also asked some of my L.A. Times colleagues what they think — particularly those who, like me, love to hike. Rachel Schnalzer, who writes our travel newsletter, Escapes, said that while she doesn’t like reaching a mountain peak and seeing “a sea of distribution centers down below,” solar and wind farms don’t bother her. “I must confess, I’m ALL for solar/wind farms — until I get to the desert and see the big aggregate farms and think, ‘Oh, I thought this was going to be rooftop solar, not something as ugly as a sprawling power plant,’” she wrote. WATER IN THE WEST Magic Johnson Park in Willowbrook is an important recreational area in South L.A. “In Los Angeles, a city with little green space and even less water, it couldn’t be more essential to create water-conscious public spaces that are also joyful and aesthetically pleasing.” That’s the conclusion of L.A. Times columnist Carolina A. Miranda in this excellent piece about rainwater capture and filtration at Magic Johnson Park, the site of a former oil storage facility in South L.A. My colleague Louis Sahagún also writes that there’s an agreement to turn an old oil field into a public park in Newport Beach.