The Joni Mitchell lyric in the title of this post has long been a favorite singalong for environmentalists and with good reason. In our urban/suburban sprawls, parking lots are the ultimate example of our disregard for the land, representing formerly open countryside now coated in asphalt and covered with cars. But there may be some redemption for this stark image of man blithely overrunning nature.

Google and other companies are building solar ‘trees’ (ironic choice of descriptive nomenclature) that provide shade to parked cars while serving as inexpensive, ideally situated platforms for solar power generation. Because these platforms can be optimized for solar collection they are often far more useful than rooftops. The open spaces already exist as parking lots and you can’t really complain that they are esthetically less pleasing than an expanse of concrete covered with vehicles.

A good example of short term improvements in the way we use commercial land. It might be interesting to calculate how much fuel might be saved by lessening the blast of AC required to cool off a car that has been sitting in the California sun all day!