The reason we have a solar power industry at all is because satellites needed robust long term power sources, not because someone cared about the environment. The first solar cells were invented in the 1880s, and were so inefficient -- less than .5%! -- they were little more than a scientific novelty. They stayed this way for 70 long years, until Bell Labs began researching them as a source of power for satellites in the 1950s.
Space is an extremely demanding environment, and it's precisely those demands that actually drive the development of technologies that enable us to radically reduce our environment impact on the Earth.
Human beings living on the Moon or on Mars will need to reuse and recycle everything imaginable, for instance, creating closed-loop systems where there is little to no waste. They will have to grow food in ways that recycle nutrients instead of destroying topsoil. They will have to be able to make extremely reliable products, and they'll have to be able to reuse and repair these items in ways we will never have the incentive to do in a disposable consumer economy.
It's simply not economically efficient to develop those kind of technologies terrestrially. It's cheaper to dump obsolete electronics and ship them to some impoverished part of the world, like rural China, where they contaminate the ground water and poison the air and the residents.( http://tinyurl.com/toxic-e-waste )
The planet is big and human labor and human life is cheap here. Recycling is optional here. Up there, it's not. It's only the extreme demands of manned space that will drive these sorts of advances.
It ain't just about shootin' rockets up into the sky.