In WI, we have many coal-fired plants and part of the exhaust is Mercury- not much of that in wood. Also, they burn when needed, not all of the time. If a warm stretch occurs, they cut back.

This is my feeling every time I open a TV for wall-mounting and have to throw away the table mount. I haven't figured out how to store them all, nor how to turn them into a big sculpture titled WASTE.

Do you have data to back that up or are you pulling this out of your a$$?
Last thing that I saw stated that the area roughly the size of Nevada would provide all solar power we'd need.

I have the largest solar array in my town. It's taking an area of just under 1,000 SqFt.
That meets 80-120% (depending on time of year) of my large power needs. That's roughly 1/8th of my total roof area on main house, not counting support buildings.
I live on 1Ac, which is ~44,000SqFt.
So my total power needs are met with ~2.5% of my property's total area.
My neighbors' power needs with same lot area are much, much smaller -- meaning their solar array size would be much smaller -- about 1-1.5% of their lot.

We could totally meet the needs of the whole world with solar panels -- albeit it would take global effort and global power distribution.
At any given time 1/3 of earth is in 'peak' sun producing (sun facing) rotation.

Hey! Look what I found:
[Link: inovateus.com]

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The history i read has Carter installing Solar Panels and Reagan removing them. What does your history say? [Link: scientificamerican.com]

I don't know who your friend Soros is but if he says that Carter installed them and Reagan removed them then hes right.

Like I said, you need to read the whole history, not the talking points. First, solar panels in the 70’s didn’t produce electricity. So stop confusing them with the panels available now. They were tied into the heating system. And, as I previously stated, those types of panels didn’t work well. They could only run wide open, often heating the water to high.

Second, at that time, terrorism was not a concern to us. The Middle East radicals had not yet really been created, and they had not target the US. The big event at that time was still the 72 slaughtering of the Israeli Olympic athletes. Once the oil embargo that OPEC had put in place was settled, there was no energy crisis. There was the Iran embassy siege in 1980, but that was in Iran, not in the US.

As for oil companies replacing Carter, Carter got himself replaced. Truth is, he was probably too good of a man to ever try to deal with Washington. But even so, his administration was filled with problems. On top of the oil crisis, there was the economy, then the Iran embassy, then there was the complete and utter failure of the hostage rescue attempt that killed 8 Special Forces operators and left wreckage of one of our helicopters and one of our planes burned up in the Iranian Desert. All of this after the Country was still fresh with scars from Vietnam and most people weren’t trusting the government.

Like I said, the truth never fits in a two sentence talking point.

Seriously, consider the source for that fluff piece.

Read the article that goes with your fluff.

[Link: good.is]

If it really was that small and easy it would be done already.
Better start training the coal miners to fix solar panels.
Tree huggers giving up 12 million acres of land, not likely.
Then there is the follow the money/politics.

The company that installed the panels was mystified at the Reagan administrations wanting to remove a functioning system. But i guess everyone but the expert knew better. Bottom line is that it was a technological step in the right direction...that the Oil companies buried via their puppet president...so that Americans could stay addicted to oil from the middle east.


I hope you are joking. Muslim terrorists held Americans hostage in their own embassy for a year and a half. This was literally the beginning of modern middle eastern/"Muslim" terrorism against the United States. [Link: en.wikipedia.org]


Two sentences like "terrorism wasn't a concern to us" and "Iran embassy"?

Let's not forget how the Iranian revolution got off the ground. Hint...US meddling.
[Link: en.m.wikipedia.org]

Of course the company that installed them was mystified. They made money selling and installing solar panels. Of course they would say they worked wonderfully. If they worked so well, why did people stop buying them when the tax credit went away? Because they didn’t make sense economically.

What part of of where I explained the Iran Embassy siege wasn’t in the US don’t you understand? And those weren’t terrorists, they would be classified as revolutionaries. At that time, we had never seen Arab radicals attack anywhere outside of the Middle East.

It’s easy to pass judgement when using hindsight. Especially when you ignore all the other facts of history at the time.

Same reason people in Arizona stopped buying them when the tax credit went away. That doesn't mean that Solar doesn't make sense economically. It means that the average home owner can't afford thousands of dollars to upgrade their homes.

Walmart pricing makes sense if you think in terms of what you have in your pocket right now. If you consider everything though...shopping at Walmart is like slitting your own throat.


Americans at a US Embassy were held hostage in Iran. By your logic Benghazi was no big deal and ISIS a revolutionary force?


4th paragraph down. [Link: presidency.ucsb.edu]

"We import now about half of all the oil we use from overseas. And this dependence on foreign sources of oil is of great concern to all of us. "

Maybe the rest of the world had their heads in the sand but Carter knew what was happening and what would come if we didn't shift away from Fossil Fuels...in 1979. Maybe if the oil companies donated a few million to his campaign he would have loosened up and played ball.

You do one thing great. You take individual points out of context and exaggerate them. Maybe that’s technically two things.

Carter had no idea what was happening. Carter was a nuclear submarine officer. He wanted more nuclear plants. He thought it was the future and was better for the envirment than fossil fuels. He did have the foresight to see the problem of being dependent on foreign oil, because of the embargo. But it had nothing to do with having a crystal ball predicting terrorism from the Middle East. But the problem was the technology at the time wasn’t even close to making that possible.

Also, truth is, we had enough of our own oil that we didn’t have to deal with the Middle East. But, OPEC collapsed our domestic production with prices so low we couldn’t dare compete.

Nope. That was Sirhan Sirhan killing Bobby Kennedy, and there were probably less devastating offenses before that that were not even blips on anybody's radar.

But, yeah, how was that NOT in America? Reagan won the election, not Carter, and Carter's feckless inability to do anything was a big part of that.


There's lots of land with no trees on it that they wouldn't have to give up.

Frankly, though, tree huggers are an interestingly focused and ignoring group. Every time I go to a restaurant and I see a gas-fired cool looking light fixture, the purpose of which is only to look cool, I think about environmentalists. And when I see how big the pilot lights are on ALL the restaurant stoves I run across (lots of 'em), I wonder where the environmentalists are.

I haven't done enough study to do a proper rant on this, but: keurig cups. One use, then trash. One friggin' cup of coffee.

Environmentalists are not savvy enough to be serious, or not serious enough to know all the things they're ignoring.

Back to our regular topic now, I guess...

Consider what source? Is the data (size required) flawed?
I showed my calcs. Are they wrong as well?

Tree huggers not giving 12 million acres of land? Really?
You show me one tree hugger that would rather see coal, oil or lumber burning power plant than PVs.
As for land use -- have you ever been in the southwest? We (AZ, NV, UT, NM and parts of Tx) have literally thousands of acres of bare land. No trees, no real life to speak of.
Mojave deserts alone is 16 million acres. Not counting all the rooftops across the country (both commercial and residential).

I'm not saying it's a perfect solution. I'm saying it's the best one we have right now short of nuclear plants which are great, efficient, scaleable and affordable, but won't be implemented because of public hysteria.

Point is, you tried to slip one by us, saying that we don't have enough surface area for all the PVs.
I proved you wrong.
Move on and next time do a bit of homework before posting crap here.

After Great Britain and France finished screwing it up, the IS rode in to save the day, failing in the process.

Most of the modern day issues in the Middle East can be connected to the Sykes Picot Agreement after WWI when mainly Great Britain and France thought the best way to prevent future problems in the region was to redraw boundaries to break up natural cultural alignments.