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Agriculture uses orders of magnitude more land than energy generation (half of all habitable land on Earth). If you are worried about global habitat loss, start
by jacobolus 6y ago
Agriculture uses orders of magnitude more land than energy generation (half of all habitable land on Earth). If you are worried about global habitat loss, start by figuring out how to make food production more space- and resource-efficient.
After that you can move on to reducing the amount of space we have devoted to suburbs; the amount of water, sand, and metal we use; the amount of plastic we dump into the ocean; the infrastructure and energy required for our transportation networks; etc.
Cutting down on space for solar panels is way way way down the list.
- macspoofing 6y ago>Agriculture uses orders of magnitude more land than energy generation (half of all habitable land on Earth). Agriculture is a problem. If you add renewables, you now have TWO problems. And funny you should mention agriculture because one of the proposed solutions to get around renewable intermittency problem is to burn bio-fuels or bio-mass. This means we would be using land not just for agriculture for human consumption, but also to grow corn or trees or whatever to burn to support the renewable infrastructure. Here's a pellet advocacy group (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOzj-d83kFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOzj-d83kFM) touting how green Denmark is because it burns wooden pellets! This is the technology of future: growing trees to burn. I'm not against this by the way, and it's a nice way to reuse discarded saw dust, but we also live in a world with little renewable deployment. When we scale up renewable infrastructure there will be dedicated land to just growing bio-mass to support renewables. Anyway, the general problem is that renewables compound every other problem we need to solve around ecosystem collapse.