UK firm's solar power breakthrough could make world's most efficient panels by 2021

[hunter]

27. Lead from rotting solar panels has a half life of FOREVER.

Wind turbines littering the landscape do not give me the warm fuzzies.

A hybrid natural gas / wind-solar power system will destroy the natural environment the same as coal. It's a "light" cigarette.

The only way to quit smoking is to quit smoking. The only way to quit fossil fuels is to quit fossil fuels and then let the pieces fall where they may.

Without fossil fuel "backup" most solar and wind schemes cannot support themselves. These wind and solar schemes are most successful where natural gas and/or hydroelectricity is cheap. In many places the capacity of hydroelectric schemes to support wind and solar has reached its limit.

I think many people who now enjoy the bounties of an industrial economy would embrace nuclear power rather than give up their consumer lifestyle. A nuclear powered economy does not need wind and solar power, which may be the reason many people oppose it, not some nebulous and misinformed fear of "nuclear waste." Many by-products of our industrial society are as bad, or even worse, than nuclear waste. Greenhouse gasses are one. We all seem to breathe toxic automobile tire and brake pad dust or diesel particulates without much complaint and these cannot be contained. Nuclear waste has a small volume and can be contained.

Solar and wind power enthusiasm is just another form of climate change denial, especially when it is practiced by affluent consumers.

The problem isn't really energy, it's this thing we call "economic productivity" which is actually a measure of the damage we are doing the the natural environment and our own human spirit.

I think we ought to be paying people to experiment with lifestyles having a very small environmental footprint. We would measure the success of these experiments in terms of happiness, not "productivity" as we now define it.

Owning a car, for example, is not a source of happiness or "freedom" for many people. They own a car to get to work. If that car fails and they can't afford to replace it, they can't work and then their suffering increases. In any case the environmental impact of every adult in the world owning a car, even a fancy electric car, would be catastrophic.

People with first world incomes almost universally have huge environmental footprints. Odds are the guy with solar panels on his roof and a Tesla in the driveway isn't making the world a better place. His environmental footprint may be a few hundred times larger than that of someone who doesn't own a car, walks to work, and has never flown anywhere.

When everyone has clean water coming out of a faucet in their own home, a flush toilet connected to a modern sewage plant, easy access to birth control without harassment by idiot religious zealots, etc..., maybe we can turn our attention to the problems of first world consumers and their toys.

Maybe the expensive toys and habits of first world consumers are the problem.