Solar Panels, for CIVIL discussion
If the whole push for this is to lower carbon emissions, how much carbon would be sequestered by a one hundred plus year old forest where the panel array is installed, versus the clean power and maintaining and replacing panels during that time?
Legit question, I don't know.
Part of the problem is that some have boiled the question down to only carbon. But when it comes to 'harm reduction', carbon isn't the only factor. Even if the solar panel offset the same amount of carbon (it probably does in some places, and solar can also go where we've already going to rip out the environment), the dust and other pollutants released are non-zero, and in some cases are alarmingly large.
Part of the problem is that eggheads simply want everything to BE electric and try to kill all markets for fossil fuels, because harm reduction isn't really the goal. The goal, for better or worse, to eliminate the use of oil/coal/tar because the assumption is that those materials are considered 'new' inputs into the complex equation that is the energy balance of our world. The reason they glom onto solar and wind is because extracting energy from those systems balances that equation when it comes to human contribution. But that's also a massive over-simplification.
The reality is that the world, at and above population densities from ~100 years ago, relies on massive additional power inputs. Manging the knock-on effects of such a thing is also going to be a thing we need to deal with, and humanity has a decent track record when it comes to dealing with slow-moving disasters. Electrification is known among all the eggheads to be a knee-jerk stopgap that won't actually have much effect, but they're banking on the hope that it opens other technological advancements or helps 'ease' us off of 'fossil fuels' so that newer tech will be more readily adopted because they're all already electric. This isn't explained in public for the same reason medical decisions have never been fully fleshed out in public either (lets ignore the obvious exception, please). No sane person thinks that there's enough 'rare earth' minerals for everyone to own and consume and dispose of a significant mass of annually, indefinitely. Recyling those materials often requires a significant amount of the energy they were used to extract previously. As a result, the amount of energy consumption per-capita needs to decrease substantially, which is probably for the better, but no one likes watching politicians rove around in luxo-barges while we're told to drive our radio-flyers to work either.
As with all things, it's a balance, and people need to know a lot more about the system they choose to participate in if they're going to argue their decision is somehow 'better'. In the end, the vast majority are doing it as a result of poor analysis - environmental, financial, or otherwise - and then rationalizing it after the fact.
