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Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

One of the upsides of not being a democracy is that NIMBY, environmentalism and health&safety can be pushed much further down on your list of concerns/priorities.

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My favorite example of this is line 2 of the Beijing subway system. It's a circular route approximately following the old city wall. During planning, there was a great debate over how to build it. Boring tunnels would have been too expensive, but the cheaper cut and cover would have destroyed many homes. Instead, they just demolished the centuries-old city wall and built it there.

I don't mean to praise that decision, but I think it's a great example of both the advantages and disadvantages of that sort of dictatorial decision making.

All true, but in this case there's millions of acres of cheap desert in the US. I think there's other forces than those retarding solar progress.

On a grander scale one could put solar plants in the sahara and use their power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. To transport energy, that is.

It's an interesting idea for a place like Australia - use solar power to desalinate water, and pump it inland. You could create an oasis in the middle of nowhere, sort of like Las Vegas.

You still have to deal with the bi-product of salt and other various minerals that come out of the desalinated water.

Genuine Aussie sea salt...

Most of them are of value? I mean, we buy salt, and esp. sea salt, and most of the other minerals are going to either salable, or at least disposable in some way. You'll even be getting very small amounts of stuff like gold too. (really not much at all, but hey, there's 20 million tons of gold in there)

That doesn't mean that nobody cares. Republicans in the West hate solar because of their historical ties to coal and petroleum.

Environmentalists dislike these things because they are essentially a death ray for birds.

Ya. Armchair treehuggers, like their brethren on the right, can be exhausting. Every year, feral cats kill billions, wind turbines 500k, office buildings another 100k...

Focusing on least harm is far more constructive then selective outrage.

(I volunteered at Audubon for a decade, trying to conserve habitat for fish, birds, trees, etc.)

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