>Who is responsible for evaluating risk in these situations? Nobody. This is one of the downsides of a democracy: the leadership changes enough that by the tim

>Who is responsible for evaluating risk in these situations? Nobody. This is one of the downsides of a democracy: the leadership changes enough that by the time long-term consequences hit those leaders are not in politics anymore. It's a bit like LLCs in that they spread the liability around on a nebulous concept of "government". Here's a related question: what's the long-term environmental impact of solar cells and wind turbines? Let's say we switch largely to those renewables... What happens when the first batch of them have exceeded their lifetime? What about the nth batch? We recently had an article about how wind turbine blades are sent to landfills. This is unlikely to have much of an impact, but if we scale this up then will it still have negligible impact? I rarely ever hear this aspect discussed even though now would be the time to do it. This way we won't be in for a nasty surprise in the future. But careers can't be built on something like this. So we ignore it until the next big problem arrives.