I get that solar POWER is infinite and clean, but the panels used to harvest it are anything but that, aren’t they? Aren’t solar panels just another way to pollute the earth because of their production and inevitable mass discarding?
Isn’t it the exact same problem for wind turbines? Won’t we eventually run out of material/resources to make those as well? Not to mention the noise pollution and the killing of avian life.
Could these alternative sources really be considered clean? If so, why?
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The wind turbines and solar panels pay back their carbon footprint at some point by offsetting what it took to make them.. by just being 0 carbon..well kinda maintainance is a carbon footprint after all. A coal plant will have cost you a considerable co2 sin to build and it will cause further emissions.
Wind and solar is considered clean. However its not as good as it could be because wind turbines and solar panel arrays on fields are basically ecosystem disruptors. They could do better on that front… because if ecosystems are disrupted that in itself can be considered dirty because nature wont do as good of a job keeping the world clean… after all that deer in the forest helps the forest grow. A forest captures co2 too. If theres no more deer population or whatever due to a giant solar areay. Welp you just shot nature in the foot… even highways do this btw. So theres an active effort in many places to make highways less ecosystem disruptive by building land bridges over highways where deer can traverse safely and so on
Nuclear power is the cleanest option we have, we just have a big stigma about it because if things go wrong they make entire areas uninhabitable.. sure you build this huge powerplant thats quite dirty and co2 intensive… but then it yeets out a cataclysmic amount of energy which is completely green and sidesteps all the other ecosystem struggles solar and wind does.
Electric vehicles meanwhile are only as green and clean as the powergrid is. The co2 sin the production of this car caused will not be offset for a loong time if it runs on coal power.. so a normal already existing used gas car can be actually greener… as you dont build a whole new car. But if your electric grid is clean. Electric cars will be too as theres no piling up of stuff.
Same way how solar and electric vehicles both cause some quite dirty mining processes for the production. The things themselves are green. The way we handle the production isn’t as green as we want it… so to truly make it green we either have to bite that bullet or we have to work on fixing the dirty production.
For instance some ressources are quite rare / annoying to get but theres easy access on the seafloor. **mining that is a horrible idea** yet we do it… so even if we have the ressources. Some processes are just a dumb idea.
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