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| thismeintiel said: Oil companies do not get subsidies, they get tax breaks. In other words, they do not get taxpayer money, like the bankrupt Solyndra did, they just get to keep more of their own moeny to further invest in their companies. Why this administration wishes to change the meaning of subsidies is beyond me. Actually, that's a lie, I know why they do it. To give gullible people a new enemy to target. The fact remains that green energy is not efficient enough yet to power a whole country. Just imagine how much land would be taken away from humans and animals to put up enough windmills and solar panels to power the entire country, plus new electric cars for everyone. And how are we going to power jets for over 4 hrs on electric? @ OP I believe we do have an impact on the atmosphere, but it is so small compared to forces that occur naturally that it isn't enough to even bother with. The only way we could change the climate is if we plugged up every volcano (above and below the ground), so there is no CO2 sprayed into the atmosphere. The you can plug every animal and human's ass, so they didn't release methane when they passed gas or used the bathroom. Have to get them all to stop breathing, as well. Oh, and while you're at it, tell the ocean and the organisms in it to stop functioning as normal, since that contributes a lot of CO2 and N2O, as well as water vapor. |
Not that much, and that's at current technology. Pump in a couple of billions research grants and subsidies and I'm sure we'll have a lot more efficient solar power generation in no time.
Ofcourse combining it with nuclear, hydro electric, wind, geothermal will greatly reduce this.
The problem is it's still cheaper to use what we have in place now. Replacing infrastructure is very expensive, but it will create a lot of jobs. At some point we'll have to move to a hydrogen fuel cell economy for all our transportation needs, cheap oil won't last forever and batteries just aren't efficient enough for the job. And we better start the transition before oil becomes very expensive.
Too bad humans don't react until it's too late.
And the climate? Yes ofcourse we've slowly been changing it. There didn't used to be billions of farm animals adding all these green house gasses to the air for example. We've drastically changed the landscape all over the earth, introduced new chemicals, changed the flow of rivers, literally moved mountains of earth etc etc.
The contents of the atmosphere has changed and we're definately helping. Nobody can really predict how far we can push the earth though. Probably pretty far, life will go on, oceans won't burn off, rain will still fall. Whether our lifestyle survives is another thing.
