Why Not Solar?

The biggest problems in our world are greed, ignorance, and lack of imagination. If only we could better educate the common people, we could all live in a better world.

I challenge you to go to an image search engine and type in the words “solar energy future”. You will find page after page of beautiful architecture and healthy people. Strangely enough, many of the pictures will be dominated by brilliant blues and greens, but is that too surprising? These are the colors of earth seen from space and everyone knows that solar power will bring about a future where people live in harmony with the earth and space travel is common and exciting. If you don’t believe me just look at these pictures:

The solar future will be bright. Nearly everyone will be young, healthy, and sexy. The men will be beautiful and muscular and their days will be split between teaching university classes and swimming in the oceans protecting the fish farms from sharks. They will do this with long knives that they hold between their teeth. The solar future will be populated by heroic god-like men.

 As to the women, they will be thin, beautiful, and will mostly wear mini skirts and dresses that fall at mid-thigh. Most of them will speak with sexy British accents and be just as smart as the men. The children will push straight blond hair out of their eyes as they perform advanced math on their computers. In the solar future, our sons and daughters will be experts at integral calculus by sixth grade, but that is a given since they will be expected to design orbiting power stations before their sixteenth birthdays.

There will also be older people in the solar powered world. They will ride bicycles along highways shared with aerodynamic electric vehicles. When they have finished in the art studio, they will fly gliders to concert halls. Of course they will be active, because none of them will have creaky joints or painful illnesses. I have seen this future in countless movies, television shows, and books.

Sadly, there are bad people in the world. It pains me to say this, but in spite of all of the best efforts to educate the public, there are still people who are small minded, mean spirited, and want to run our country using oil and coal. These dangerous people are trying to stop the solar future so that they can continue to pollute the world. These people are not truly evil, but they have not learned that there is a better way. More than anything else, they are not educated. They don’t understand that with solar energy we will all be young, beautiful, educated, and live near the ocean, or at least be able to get to the ocean quickly in our gliders.

These banal people tell us that solar energy is not dependable enough. They argue that solar powered house would never have quite enough electricity and be dimly lit. They claim that making solar cells required big, ugly factories that spew toxins into the environment. They drone on that any realistic solar energy system will require enormous energy storage, such as batteries that would also pollute our environment and consume resources. The most petty and ill informed thing that the defenders of the status quo claim is that solar power is so insignificant today because it just doesn’t work very well. They are wrong and have not done their math very well. They don’t have smart children and they don’t teach university classes or have an art studio. They have not seen all of the blue and green pictures with solar arrays. If only people were better educated, our solar future could begin.

Solar energy produces less than 0.1% of the electricity in the US today. I want you to look into your heart and ask yourself a question. Is solar energy insignificant because it is being held back by uneducated and mean-spirited people, or because it doesn’t work as advertised?