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Originally Posted by SAMIAM
Brk-Int......That me be true....I certainly hope so. I don't mean to harp on this so much, but I just don't think it's worth hurting any wild life to power up our homes when there are so many other sources. I'm all in favor of other sources of alternative energy. Solar is great and doesn't anything.  |
Understood. I think though that you might be comparing direct measurables, like dead birds on the ground, to less direct factors.
Solar cell manufacturing is a messy, chemical-ridden process. Both for the solar panels, and for the batteries that sit behind them to provide energy storage for when it is dark out. That has a lot of environmental side affects that people don't directly concentrate on.
Coal or natural gas plants have environmental side effects, and so on.
The fact is that there is no "clean" way to power our lives. Electricity is not a naturally occurring phenomenon (eliminating lighting or things that can't be properly harnessed or predicted). The only way to get electricity is to convert some element (wind, sunlight, gas, coal, etc.) into electron movement. Then, we have to carry those electrons through hundreds of miles of cable (made of metals mined from the earth) and through transformers (made of more metal, with various fluids in them), and so on.
To mangle an old Internet meme, every time you load a web page, the power company kills a kitten.
I agree that we should try to minimize the impact we make on the world with our electricity generation and distribution, but we should look at the full impact of various power options, not just the right-in-front-of-your-face impact, which does not always tell the whole story.