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Richard Meier told me, 'Young man, solar energy has nothing to do with architecture.'
Sep 30, 2025
I think the future for solar energy is bright.
We live in a world bathed in 5,000 times more energy than we consume as a species in the year, in the form of solar energy.
You could power the entire United States with about 150 to 200 square kilometers of solar panels, the entire United States. Take a corner of Utah... there's not much going on there, I've been there. There's not even radio stations.
The primary means of energy generation is going to solar. It will at least be a plurality, and probably be a slight majority in the long term.
God is not going to send us a bill for solar energy, but the gas industry will.
We have this handy fusion reactor in the sky called the sun, you don't have to do anything, it just works. It shows up every day.
I assume we will have figured out a way to efficiently utilize solar energy and tied that to an efficient way to use nuclear energy in such a way that it doesn't pose a serious environmental issue.
Our expertise is solar energy and we don't want to focus on other forms and we never push for solar form everywhere like say in upper hill areas where eco-hydro or biogas is more viable.
We could do some household and neighborhood or town wind energy. But even this will run up eventually against the problem of needing an underlying fossil fuel economy to fabricate the hardware. Same with photovoltaic (solar) energy. We're going to be disappointed by what these things can do for us.
Human needs are served by a sustainable lifestyle, almost by definition, if humans include coming generations. And a shift to such technologies as high-speed rail instead of maximizing fossil fuel use, and solar energy, is not "relentless resource extraction."
One of the reasons I think the population question is important, if we want to be as green as possible, any of our energy that is truly renewable is limited. Solar and wind are intermittent and they're so diffuse, it's difficult to harness them in a significant way. But one thing we could be doing is making it a law (like it is in Israel and Cyprus) to take every building eight stories or under and heat all of the water in those buildings with solar energy. It's absolutely simple and cheap technology.
Now, I know Obama was trying to take the long view, but talking about solar energy in the middle of the oil spill is like watching your house engulfed in flames and saying, 'We really should change the curtains.'
Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of ... permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.
We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy - sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
Is the warming unprecedented? Probably not. There is abundant historical and proxy evidence for both hotter and cooler periods in human history. Is it our fault? Again, maybe. The correlation of increasing warmth with increasing carbon dioxide concentrations is particularly weak; that with solar energy and with ocean movements is much stronger.
Everything we eat begins with a plant turning solar energy into carbohydrates. Everything. Whether we're eating meat or eating vegetables, it all begins there. So I'm always interested in taking things back to the beginning.
I urge individuals around the world to stand up, and ask local leaders, if they haven't already, to pledge to purchase cleaner cars, build green facilities, and buy green power like wind or solar energy. Our actions may determine if we become a casualty in the war for a habitable planet for generations to come.
We only have to capture 1/10,000th of the solar energy landing on earth to completely satisfy all our energy needs.
I'd like the campaigning to be about all the things they're not going to do. Just tell me what you're not going do! Don't tell me what you're going to do. Just say "I'd really like to do solar energy but I'm not going to be able to. I really want to dig holes everywhere in the country but I really won't be able to do it because people seem to think that maybe my water will be screwed up."
Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.
Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and stored in the form of complex carbon molecules. A food chain is a system for passing those calories on to species that lack the pant's unique ability to synthesize them from sunlight.
If Obama can force you to get health insurance just by calling it a tax, than there is nothing to stop him from making you gay marry an illegal immigrant wearing a condom on a hydroponic pot farm powered by solar energy.
I do have fantasies of buying a helicopter and a lot of machine guns, but I don't know if I can do that. I'd like to have a lot of weapons, grenades and things. And I want to have a solar energy machine. And I want to have a sunken garden with a glass roof. I guess that's about it for now. I have a few other wants but I can't remember them.
Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards. Wherever I go I meet innovators of wind power equipment, solar energy operators.
The wealth of any ecosystem is its perennials. The primal herbivore-predator-disturbance-rest dance is literally the breath and pulse of the earth. Grasses recycle oxygen far more efficiently than trees. The turnover is faster. Grass reaches out and turns solar energy into carbon. Tillage hyper-aerates the soil, burning out carbon. But because a plant creates bilateral symmetry at the soil horizon, it sloughs off root mass when the top gets chopped off.
What do oil company executives, vampires and NASA bureaucrats all have in common? They fear solar energy.
We are proposing buildings that, like trees, are net energy exporters, produce more energy than they consume, accrue and store solar energy, and purify their own waste, water and release it slowly in a purer form.
The radiations that pour upon the earth cause the biosphere to take on properties unknown to lifeless planetary surfaces, and thus transform the face of the earth. Activated by radiation, the matter of the biosphere collects and redistributes solar energy, and converts it ultimately into free energy capable of doing work on earth.
We simply have to transition from an economy based almost exclusively on oil and coal and natural gas to one that's far more diversified, that uses solar energy, and wind energy, and the power of the tides, and bio-mass energy, and eventually, develops hydrogen.
The sunlight ... that strikes Earth’s land surface in two hours is equivalent to total human energy use in a year. While much of that sunlight becomes heat, solar energy is also responsible for the energy embodied in wind, hydro, wave, and biomass, each with the potential to be harnessed for human use. Only a small portion of that enormous daily, renewable flux of energy will ever be needed by humanity.
I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.
Mostly, I spend my time being a mother to my two children, working in my organic garden, raising masses of sweet peas, being passionately involved in conservation, recycling and solar energy.
The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.
If I were to do a foundation, it would be to promote solar energy. And I'm worried about drilling for oil. I think it is harming the earth, 'cos it drains the layer of oil under the surface, and that could be causing earthquakes. It's like we're giving the earth arthritis. I don't know if that sounds crazy.
Apple is apparently building a large solar energy farm in North Carolina. And if there's any justice, the minute they're done building it, God will introduce a newer, smaller sun that's not compatible with their machinery.
I think there's a really great amount of potential for Hawaii to become an example of what's possible with renewable energy because there are so many renewable resources here: energy, solar energy, and wind energy. There's so much potential here.
If Earth ever suffers a runaway greenhouse effect (like what has happened on Venus), then our atmosphere would trap excess amounts of solar energy, the air temperature would rise, and the oceans would swiftly evaporate into the atmosphere as they sustained a rolling boil. This would be bad.
A large-scale wind, water and solar energy system can reliably supply the world’s needs, significantly benefiting climate, air quality, water quality, ecology and energy security ... [T]he obstacles are primarily political, not technical.
If an aircraft is able to fly day and night without fuel, propelled only by solar energy, let no one claim that it is impossible to do the same thing for motor vehicles, heating and air-conditioning systems or computers, etc. This project voices our conviction that a pioneering spirit with political vision can together change society and and reduce society's dependence on fossil energies.
If we all used clotheslines, we could save 30 million tons of coal a year, or shut down 15 nuclear power plants. And you don't have to wait to start. Yours could be up by this afternoon. To be specific, buy 50 feet of clothesline and a $3 bag of clothespins and become a solar energy pioneer.
Essentially, my kids grew up with the emphasis on the environment because I became a political activist in about 1969 and it was not an easy time. Those were the days when the oil and gas companies pretty much controlled the show and anybody speaking about solar energy or carbon energy would get smashed down as being a radical or a tree-hugger or what have you. So I was out there feeling very often alone and my kids would get that.
So, there's quite a big keep-out zone, and when you factor the keep-out zone into account, the solar panels put on that area would typically generate more power than that nuclear power plant.
This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity: it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.
There are three reasons, . . . apart from scientific considerations, mankind needs to travel in space. The first . . . is garbage disposal; we need to transfer industrial processes into space so that the earth may remain a green and pleasant place for our grandchildren to live in. The second . . . to escape material impoverishment: the resources of this planet are finite, and we shall not forego forever the abundance of solar energy and minerals and living space that are spread out all around us. The third . . . our spiritual need for an open frontier.
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