I’m getting soooo tired of the utter BS that’s force-fed to FB users I’m compelled to write a special post about it.
“They” will do absolutely anything to make their solar panels look as environmentally friendly as possible by mixing it with food production.
Like this BS. AI generated to boot, I’m absolutely certain…. We’ve built greenhouses. Do you know what they’re for? Harnessing solar heat to grow plants when it’s cold….!! Shading a greenhouse with solar panels is like driving a car with flat tyres….
Dual Harvest
Dual harvesting is what they’re calling this. You know, food and electricity…. Except food doesn’t grow in the shade.
This is an image from a magazine I used to buy back in the days I drank the coolaid. I specifically picked it because it’s actually in TASMANIA….. just look at where the sheep are. In the sun! It was -1.7°C here this morning, you better believe our flock were out in the open looking for some solar energy. Interesting too is why is the grass dead in front of the bottom of the panels…. But I digress. In winter, our sheep like to spend the night at the bottom of our dam where our mini forest of non deciduous native trees disallows frost to settle because while it’s still cold, it’s dry. No moisture on the ground, no frost.
This is how Dual Harvesting is actually done.
They’re called LEAVES. Leaves are amazing solar panels. They collect solar energy and through photosynthesis turn it into productive stuff like wood, fruit, and soil. The sheep shit and piss everywhere, fertilising the trees in the process. And build soil at the same time. We no longer eat apples (you know, plants are trying to kill you) but the animals with four stomachs actually designed to do this love apples, especially when feeding lambs. It’s called permaculture. Working with nature instead of industry….. But wait there’s more….. because when it occasionally gets hot, the trees offer shelter from the sun when the animals need it…
Well almost no solar panels, early spring and they’re starting to come back. But this is what nature can do that industry cannot. Remove the shading when it’s bloody cold and the grass AND the sheep want maximum solar energy. Winter is the season of shadows. With the sun low on the horizon, the shadows significantly grow in length and duration because, you know, long nights….
My gut feeling is that sheep under a PV array will need feeding with fossil fuels derived fodder coming from somewhere NOT covered with solar panels….
Furthermore, at the end of their life, all the PVs will go to landfill. Our trees will be still flourishing AND pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere which PVs cannot do.
To finish with, here are some words of wisdom from my Canadian friend Dave Pollard’s great blog…:
Perhaps it’s just a sign of old-age crotchetiness, but I am told, and I accept, that my take on many things is now decidedly more negative than it has been for most of my life. It’s not that I don’t believe people are doing their best (not that I think we have any choice in that). It’s more a sense that everything we do — our systems, our institutions, our centres of power — seem increasingly plagued by what I have called four-fold incompetence. These incompetences are:lack of cognitive (critical and creative thinking) skills;
lack of evidence-supported knowledge and information, and ability to assess and apply it;
lack of deep, personal, relevant experience, that adds flesh to the bones of theory and mere opinion, and
lack of sound mental health.
And a sense that, as Hugh Macleod long ago observed in his notorious, acerbic hierarchy of organizations pyramid (though it seems to have vanished from his site as he has since gone mainstream), the particularly incompetent (Trump, Musk, Kennedy, all the tech CEOs, et al) seem psychopathically driven to strive for and ultimately attain (or spectacularly fail to do so) wealth and power, and hence, inevitably, wield them with truly breathtaking incompetence.
When we see evidence of this manifold incompetence everywhere — not only in our ‘leaders’ but in the vast majority of what we read, watch, and hear in every form of media — it does tend to make one throw up one’s arms in disgust. The utter imaginative and intellectual poverty of the vast majority of contemporary ‘popular’ literature, film, and music; the mediocrity of almost all recent analytical writing; the paucity of original thought and even of critical thought in most new works of science, philosophy, and the humanities — is this really the best we can do as our civilization crumbles and wreaks havoc on our planet, until it precludes the possibility of living on it at all?I wasn’t expecting a Hollywood ending to our brave, wonderful, cruel, insane, destructive, and disastrous brief reign as the dominant species on the planet (and likely also as the most arrogant one the planet has ever seen). But I was hoping that my chronicling of its collapse would at least rise above the level of repetition, bone-headedness, and mediocrity.
“This is the way the world ends”, Eliot wrote. “Not with a bang, but a whimper.” Grouchily, and unreasonably, perhaps, I’d expected a little more from our pathetic species, the self-professed “crown of creation“. Pretty sad, all told, I think. But then, I’m old.
Damn the Matrix 