Reply to post: "some of the daylight that the sun carelessly drops in our direction and is just going to waste"

"some of the daylight that the sun carelessly drops in our direction and is just going to waste"

Not exactly going to waste. The 'daylight' would otherwise fall on the surfaces that the PV panels cover up, warming them, and even causing plants to grow. Granted that the PV converts energy into a form we find more convenient, but the concept of 'waste' in this context seems rather narrowly western-urban-ethnocentric for comfort. As a parallel, a Cambridge physicist calculated a few years back that, given the typical density of UK housing estates (20+ dwellings per acre), geothermal heating would not work except for the few, as there wouldn't be enough to go round.

What we really have to do to sustain our own future as a species (the planet itself being much more robust than we are) is to abandon the concept of growth being the primary indicator of achievement. Granted, it's the measure 'used' by all life on the planet but the gross impact of all other species is curbed by inherent limits such as dying out by the ton when resources dry up. Our fundamental difference is that we're so darned adaptable that we have so far sidestepped such natural controls. Consequently, we have to start thinking differently - not 'going back to nature' in this respect but striving to overcome the 'natural' drives and patterns of behaviour. Locusts can only operate the way they do because they're hard wired to do so. We have the capacity to abandon the evolutionary hard wiring, and it's long overdue that we did.