In addition, carparks in the US could be argued to be an ecological and sociological disaster.

If you could somehow have cars without carparks (maybe the car folds up, I dunno), it would be one the biggest quality-of-life improvements in my lifetime. Probably about on par with the smartphone for me personally, probably a bigger improvement for people who are very poor.

The article was talking about the need for WORLD energy production, whereas I was comparing it to the amount of land used for parking in the US alone. If you spread that much land use among the entire world it isn’t that crazy.

Moreover re: the other comments about parking being an ecological disaster, I agree, but that’s more because of the car-dependency that parking comes with than the pavement itself. Pavement is ALSO a problem, particularly re: surface water permeability and flooding. But most solar and wind installations don’t require the same vast expanses of impermeable surface.

Lastly, remember that wind, at least, can and is often installed off-shore, so when you consider the surface of the ocean as a viable place to distribute some of this land use its even less concerning - at least relative to the continued burning of fossil fuels and associated greenhouse gas emissions.

If some other type of energy generation system used as much land as solar there is no way environmentalists would have ever supported it (rightfully so, I would say). I think solar was just not practical until very recently to actually be used at grid scale. So in the past saying one should stop burning coal and use solar was just a way of saying stop using power altogether and do some kind of back-to-the-land thing.