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China's Largest Solar Farm Is Quietly Changing The Desert Around It (www.bgr.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/energy@slrpnk.net
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A solar farm in China is greening the land around it by reducing ground water evaporation, cutting down on wind, and adding water to the ground.

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[–] [S] 19 points 7 months ago (4 children)

And I think scale is the critical thing for other reasons too. We know, for example, that dust from the Sahara circulates the globe and brings nutrients to US soils. While I don't think there's much harm from something even at the current scale of the Gobi deployments, at a certain point deploying anything en masse is basically geoengineering, with all of the potential unexpected consequences that that brings.

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  • [–] 26 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    deploying anything en masse is basically geoengineering, with all of the potential unexpected consequences that that brings.

    Yeah I mean. How many internal combustion engines are running right now? In the course of me responding to your reply how many million tons of CO2 were being emitted?

    I mean if were going to talk en masse geoengineering, lets talk en masse geoengineering. And lets just take the piss: Say for example there was an unintended consequence to mounting a bunch of solar panels in the desert. At least, if you had this consequences and wanted to undo it, you could un-mount the solar panels and move them some where else. There is no unburning fossil fuels once emitted. Or clear cutting millions of acres of forested lands and putting it into farm land. Or exterminating a key stone species like buffalo or beavers. Or leaving methane leaks uncapped. Like.. We've been geoengineering the entire time. What are we even talking about?

    There are some interesting questions around what something like mounting these solar panels does to the carbon cycle. Phenology would be a big one. Water storage. ET. Very interesting stuff.

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  • [–] -2 points 7 months ago

    You can't call uncaring consumption or negligent cost-cutting measures geo-engineering. Geo-engineering is an expense, and whoever spends is looking at their returns, which is an incentive to do worse than uncaring consumption etc.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago

    We know, for example, that dust from the Sahara circulates the globe and brings nutrients to US soils.

    Eh, the Amazon rainforest survived the African Humid Period, so it's probably fine.

    More to the point, even if this thing is big compared to the average solar farm, it's still small compared to the scale of geoengineering. For example, enough solar panels to power the entire US would only cover a small fraction of the Chihuahuan Desert:

    (source)

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