On September 13, the New York Daily News ran my piece on the Biden Administration’s recent report which claimed the US could be getting 45 percent of its electricity from solar by 2050. (Never mind that Biden has said he wants to decarbonize the electric grid by 2035). In any case, I began the piece: 

• Hyping solar energy is one of Washington, D.C.’s most renewable resources. Back in 1979, President Jimmy Carter declared the U.S. needed to capture more energy from the sun because of “inevitable shortages of fossil fuels.” Last week, President Biden released a plan that claims the U.S. should be getting nearly half of its electricity from solar by 2050, up from 3% today, because — contrary to what Carter said back in 1979 about shortages of fossil fuels — we are using too much coal, oil, and natural gas and because climate change poses “an existential threat to our lives. But Biden’s plan ignores history, land-use conflicts, and the need to preserve and expand our use of nuclear energy.

I concluded this way:

• Before closing, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that nearly half of the global supply of the polysilicon used in panels has been coming from China’s Xinjiang province, where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are working in slave labor conditions. I’d also be remiss not to mention the recent study by three economists at Harvard University who warned about the looming wave of toxic “solar trash” and their prediction that by 2035, the amount of discarded solar panels could “outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times.” In short, it’s time for Biden and his team to quit hyping solar and get serious about nuclear energy.

Again, here’s a link.

Photo by Andreas Gücklhorn on Unsplash.