Besides we can still use that same land for crops with agrivoltaics
I’m all for electric, but this is, at best, a negation of the complaints that solar requires ‘too much space.’ In terms of an efficiency argument, this is not remotely appropriate, a girders to oranges comparison, if you will.
But what would happen to the sunlight? Y’all are just trying to kill the sun!!!
Biofuels are a scam. They get worse mileage, it takes as much energy to make as it produces, the pollution is worse, it leads to toxic chemicals from the agriculture being introduced into the environment, and it raises the price of food.
All those talking points are courtesy of gas and oil. Any farming means toxic chemicals, ethanols only take energy because renewable sources are not used for distillation, and no farming used for ethanol comes from food crops.
Most of the corn grown in the US is not edible, it is grown to make oils, sugar and plastics.
It’s unfortunate the arguments are in favor of oil, but they are true, those aren’t arguments the oil companies made through their bullshit mercenary scientific outfits, those are from real studies that have been made and reported on by real scientists and do gooders over the decades. And reported in real publications, from newspapers, back when those still existed, to periodicals.
The pesticides and fertilizers from corn are not something to slough off, it’s systematic pollution at this point, and they use more and worse chemicals for the stuff that’s not for human consumption.
A good share of corn is used to make ethanol, I don’t doubt they use the leftovers from that to make plastics, that’s exactly the problem it drives food prices up taking away agricultural land by subsidizing inefficient fuel production, started during the Bush Administration by the way, the ultimate whores to big oil.
Corn oil and syrup/sugar, is for human consumption, and included in what we call food. It’s also subsidized and driving bad outcomes but that’s another story. 5% of the continental united states is corn. 5% of the total land in the lower 48 is devoted to corn. Think about that. There is only one larger crop, grass. Worthless lawns, although Idk if that is measured in land coverage or weight of the product to be honest.
lol okay I get being suspicious of oil and gas bs, but some of what you said about ethanol is just not right…
In the US most ethanol is made from corn. It’s usually field corn, not the kind you eat like corn on the cob, but it’s still part of the food system. It turns into animal feed and all the corn ingredients in processed food, so saying “no ethanol comes from food crops” doesn’t really hold up.
Also yeah you could power the distillation with renewables, cool, but that doesn’t magically fix the bigger issues people point to: growing more corn usually means more fertilizer and more runoff and more land pressure. You know how much fertilizer corn takes?
That’s not just “oil talking points,” that’s just what happens when you scale it… i’m not saying ethanol is pure evil or whatever, but dismissing the criticism as all oil propaganda is doing the same thing in reverse. It’s certainly not the climate justice solution they’ve sold it as.
Unfortunate that the person that made this article shot themself in the back of the head 3 times with a long range rifle.
??
Both authors seem to be alive:
Is this a pessimistic joke like movie’s where someone creates cold fusion so the government is after them to cover it up?
If you write movie’s, why don’t you also write author’s?
Yes
I only really asked because of the upvotes. It’s a bit upsetting how pessimistic the audience is
It would probably use less water too. Crops require a lot of water, and biofuel crops more than most. I’ve heard it’s putting a massive drain on the available water in some places.
I hope this is only to put things in perspectives because cars suck for a multitude of other reasons, however we power them.
We can use solar energy to move a box that weighs 1/2 tons around, for every individual on the planet. The cars will still shed microplastics. The cars will still require paved parking lots that are not permeable, worsening floods, and generate heat islands. The cars will still kill one or two billion animals every year. The cars will still kill about a million people worldwide every year; one every 30 seconds.
It would be nice to have this energy used for something else than powering deadly inefficient cars.
It’s been great traveling the world and seeing more and more solar installations. There is a long tail for things like aviation and plenty of chemistry but the world is changing. It would be nice if less governments were voted in that were anti the transition but progress is still being made
Here’s a whole article on agrovoltaics. IIRC, they require less water because of the shade. https://www.climatehubs.usda.gov/hubs/northwest/topic/agrivoltaics-pairing-solar-power-and-agriculture-northwest
The size of Germany, Poland, Finland, or Italy
😄
First, pretty weird to go with 4 examples
Second, those 4 are of VASTLY different sizes by “my country isn’t one of the 5 largest in the world” standards. The difference in size between Germany and Italy is the equivalent of almost 150% of Denmark.
Third, even IF those countries were roughly the same size, they’re of such disparate shapes that the comparison would STILL be pretty much useless as a reference point to most people.
is the equivalent of almost 150% of Denmark.
I chuckled. Weird comparison usage should be embraced! :D
What about the required raw materials to fabricate the solar panels? What about aging and recycling rate?
I don’t say, abandon solar power. I say: improve the recycling rate of the panels. Dual use agricultural land, maybe try to take advantage of the panel’s properties for agricultural land use (shadows cast by the panels, wind erosion idk).
And maybe evaluate where cars for personal transportation are really needed and how the fuel efficiency could be raised.
Mass transportation complemented by bike and scooter rentals - it’s mostly an infrastructural change, which leads to reduced fuel consumption.
Car sharing: One could aim to increase the frequency of use per vehicle - less cars to build, less space required for parking lots and streets.
Turns out turning sunlight into food and then burning it is very inefficient, who could have guessed /s
It’s not an inefficient way to turn political donations into federal subsidies though, and that’s the real point of it. It’s horribly inefficient, worse pollution, worse mileage, takes as much energy to make as they get from it, leads to overuse of chemicals that get everywhere, and raises food prices.
None of that matters a whit, because it turns donations to lawmakers into huge subsidies to agribusiness, the majority of which get claimed by the few remaining gatekeeping conglomerates in the agricultural sector.
How about putting that farmland back to producing food, and covering all our rooftops and carparks with solar panels?
Its even more efficient. In Poland we have that project, where food is grown under solar panels - they harvest even more than before, because panels protect plants from too much sun.
I second this, if you design your solar panels well, not only do you get to outpu a lot of electricity, yiu actually increase your crop/cattle etc yield
There is already an over production of food. We don’t need to grow more food.
I don’t know about that, but we certainly need to waste less food, and removing the profit motive from it’s production might help getting it to the people that need it but can’t get it. There are still people in the world starving needlessly.
We both grow more than we need, and throw more than we should away.
Some of that is a result of picky shoppers wanting unblemished produce. Some of that is a result of not having an
easyprofit motivated way of getting produce from where it’s grown to where it’s most desperately needed.We have tropical fruit available all year, but when impoverished peoples experience a crop failure, best we can do is send powdered milk.
Which incidentally may have cured them of lactose intolerance.
People are starving because capitalists would rather throw away perfectly good food and put bleach on it than give it to the starving to maximize their profits
It was a metaphor, no one is thinking of replacing farmland with solar panels.
And this whole thread ignores inclement weather. A few years ago Texas had 35MW of solar panels destroyed in minutes by hail. Hurricanes and tornadoes will do the same thing.
It was a metaphor, no one is thinking of replacing farmland with solar panels.
Fair point. It’s just the idea of using perfectly good farmland to fuel cars feels like a fucked up priority to me.
Farmland installs can be cheaper.
If combined with farming it can protect yields but is more costly, but that’s another topic
Please. I used to live in RI and driving through ri and ma you will regularly see ACRE upon ACRE of woodland mowed down, flattened, and thousanda of gaudy panels put up in what was once public lands and wooded areas. They do this right outside of the Worcester city limits like they don’t have acre upon ACRE of already developed paved over areas that could benefit from shade from solar panels(think car parks, strap mall and dept store building roofs, residential roofs etc). I’m all for solar but I hate when they destroy nature for no reason. I’m not stupid I know it’s easier to build them on a level earth than on rooftops but we only have so much land available as it is why not be more efficient with the land we have already used?
Oil refining uses an insane amount of energy.
An electric car could travel 60km (or more) on the electricity used to refine enough fuel to drive 100km.
Instructions unclear, re-invaded Poland.
O kurwa, znowu to samo.
“they were invited” german tour guide in family guy
Now do lithium mine externalities.
Again, our proposal isn’t that we should cover all of this land in solar panels, or that it could easily power the world on its own. We don’t account for the fact that we’d need energy storage and other options to make sure that power is available where and when it’s needed (not just when the sun is shining). We’re just trying to get a sense of perspective for how much electricity could be produced by using that land in more efficient ways.
Now do iron and aluminum mine externalities for ICE cars, which carry hundreds of pounds extra of those metals, plus much rarer cataysts like platinum and rubidium. The business community keeps quoting one white paper written by Volvo on this, but of course, no one actually read that paper because the authors saw fit to exclude the metals used in engines and transmissions in ICE cars when comparing to EVs. There is so much bullshit math on both sides of this argument, no one is realizing how we are getting distracted from major sources of pollution that continue unfettered like shipping, air travel and cement production.
