On 24 June 2014 05:47, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 12:25 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List > <everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote: > > > more than half of a summer day peak demand of the major European economy >> coming from solar electricity, >> > > Germany has encouraged solar energy with huge subsidies more aggressively > than any other country in Europe; Germany is a rich country so they can > afford to produce electricity in a way that is vastly more expensive than > coal or natural gas or hydroelectric or nuclear or anything else except > perhaps wind power. As a result Germany is not only the leader in solar > energy it is also the leader in high electric bills, and "almost seven > million households in the country are living in energy poverty—defined as > having to spend more than 10 percent of income on energy bills". Germany > embarked on their solar energy crusade in 2000, in that year electricity > cost 18 cents per kilowatt-hour, today its 37 cents and 800,000 Germans > have had their electricity cut off because they couldn't pay their bill. > And despite their herculean effort it turns out that Germany isn't even > very green, in 2009 Germany emitted 913 million metric tons of carbon > dioxide into the air, in 2013 it emitted 951. > > Rich countries can afford, at least for a while, to make energy in a > ridiculously inefficient way, but you're never ever going to convince poor > countries, the vast majority of the world, to follow the German model. No > matter how loudly the environmentalists in rich western countries scream > the developing world will never change their ways until you show them a way > to make electricity cheaper than coal. >
I agree. Rich countries can afford a lot of things that poor ones can't, something they do to a large extent by outsourcing slavery to the Third World. However, there is hope for the maintenance of a human-friendly environment -- the cost of solar panels is still in free fall, I believe, and new ways to collect solar energy are being invented all the time. “We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy--sun, wind and tide. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” -- Thomas Edison -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
