The last few posts have been about meat: how to get the most product at the lowest cost, where "cost" includes damage to the environment as well as producer costs. This article asks the same question: how to get the most product with the lowest costs, but this time the focus is on land. When we take a rock out of the ground and use that to drive our cars or even power our phones, that's a neat trick: hopefully it results in a small footprint environmentally while packing a wallop energy-wise. Of course, we need to be aware of the full set of costs of climate change, but one such cost is land.
This article by Joseph Kiesecker in the Nature Conservancy magazine is about the footprint of energy sources such as wind and solar. The land use costs are pretty high at the moment, though we can limit the damage by repurposing land on sites such as mines and waste pits. Still, keeping the same ideas in mind- getting the most energy at the lowest cost, while thinking of as many costs as possible- is a tried and true recipe for identifying different sides of important and difficult problems. There's always plenty to think about!
Ooo, post script: here is another example of the rising footprint of renewable energy sources. This article by Sarah Gilman for the Atlantic is about an endangered sea bird from northern Chile, where researchers have managed to track it a fascinating habitat underground.
