Harold R. Hay: Solar Pioneer

(Page 11 of 17)

September/October 1976
By Mother Earth News Editors 
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PLOWBOY: But, spread out as we are, we're already beginning to find our sheer numbers to be a problem. How can we pull back from all the marginal areas of the world that we now live in? We'd soon be stepping on each other!

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HAY: Exactly. We've already overpopulated the planet. Any time some of us have to move into a climate that isn't really suited to our species, we're overpopulated. We need population control right now if we expect to stop our destruction of the earth.

The pyramids are probably the best examples of structures which use the principle of thermal lag to maintain a constant temperature.

If we all lived in the areas that we're suited for—with enough space around each of us to supply our shelter, food, energy, and other needs right at the point of use—we wouldn't be tearing the planet apart in our search for fossil fuels and other resources. We wouldn't be polluting our landscape and water and air. We wouldn't be seriously considering utterly ridiculous "solutions"—such as nuclear energy and space stations and the colonization of other planets.

There's only one real solution to the problems that man has brought to the world. We must severely restrict our population and we must each learn to live on the energy which falls on our own roofs.

PLOWBOY: Solar energy.

HAY: Yes, but—even there—we've got to learn to work with nature. We can both use and misuse even solar energy, you know. I delivered a paper on this subject—Solar Energy, Solar Power, and Pollution — at the 1972 International Solar Energy Society meeting in Paris. And in that paper I pointed out that the direct use of solar fall on a house is completely non-polluting ... while the collection of that same solar fall in one area, its conversion to electricity, and then its transportation to another area can be very polluting.

There are schemes being bandied about, you know, for hanging solar collecting satellites in the sky and then beaming the energy they gather down to earth. And there are other plans to collect solar energy in 100mile-square areas of the desert and turn it into electricity and transmit it into our big cities.

But who needs any more junk orbiting the earth'? Our space scientists are already complaining about the amount of man-made garbage we've shot into space. And who needs to cover the desert with solar cells? That's just another way of polluting the landscape. And who needs to build more transmission lines from the desert into the cities'? Transmission lines are eyesores. And who needs to manufacture all the hardware we'll need for these projects? We're going to have to burn a lot of fossil fuels just to run the factories and machines we'll have to use to set these new systems up ... and t hat means more pollution right there. And what will that electricity run when we get it into town'? Air conditioners. Furnaces, A lot of equipment that will also have to be manufactured, and advertised, and sold, and hauled from factories to stores to apartments and houses ... and eventually junked. And that means even more pollution ... not to mention the thermal changes that will take place in the atmosphere when you collect heat in one area, change it to electricity, and ship it to another part of the country. But if you just take the solar energy that falls on your roof and use it right there to warm and cool your house ... ah, that's a different story! We can do that without creating any real pollution at all.

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