Quote Originally Posted by Chronos View Post
That depends on the area: "temperate" covers a wide range. Energy usage varies by season, but which way does it vary? Around here (Cleveland), people use much more energy in the winter, because our winters are cold, and our summers are moderate. In the southern US, however, winters are comfortable, but air conditioning is needed in the summer, so more energy is used in the summer. And the places where energy use is higher in the summer tend to be the places that are better suited to solar power to begin with.

I think it's an all too common mistake to try to find The Solution. Solar isn't The Solution. Nor is wind, nor nuclear, nor any single technology you can think of, because there is no one single solution. The solution is actually a combination of all of the solutions. Build more solar, where it makes sense. Build wind turbines, where they make sense. Increase efficiency everywhere we can. Increase flexibility via smart metering, to mitigate the unpredictability of wind and solar. If you happen to be in one of the few areas where tide power or geothermal is practical, use that too. Continue using fossil fuels where you absolutely must, but mitigate them as much as possible with carbon sequestration elsewhere. And so on.
Yeah, when winter gets cold, wind power is much better than solar, but less so in the summer (though that depends on the summer I suppose).

We'd actually be a lot better off if we were landfilling much more plastic. There's no shortage of landfill space, and won't be for a thousand years. It's purely a political problem, not a technical one. And plastic in a landfill is sequestered carbon. Much better for that plastic trash to be lying around where there's plenty of room for it, than for it to be eaten and turned into carbon dioxide, which we don't have room for.
Until it gets eaten and converted to oil, sugars or methane.

However, the seas was what I was mainly talking about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_gyre

Pollution
Main articles: Great Pacific garbage patch, Indian Ocean garbage patch, and North Atlantic garbage patch

Ocean gyres are known to collect pollutants. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the central North Pacific Ocean is a gyre of marine debris particles and floating trash halfway between Hawaii and California, and extends over an indeterminate area of widely varying range depending on the degree of plastic concentration used to define it. An estimated 80,000 metric tons of plastic inhabit the patch, totaling 1.8 trillion pieces. 92% of the mass in the patch comes from objects larger than 0.5 centimeters.

A similar patch of floating plastic debris is found in the Atlantic Ocean, called the North Atlantic garbage patch. The patch is estimated to be hundreds of kilometers across in size, with a density of over 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometer.