How long till every house has a solar array?

If every home on the planet had a solar array, our global-warming problems would reach explosive levels. Any environmentalist worth their salt would start a suicide-bombing campaign to prevent this from happening.

Consider: even operating at their most efficient, a consumer-grade solar array is only converting about 20-30% of the sun’s energy into electricity, but the remaining 70% doesn’t simply vanish. It’s being converted into heat and being absorbed by the giant black panels you’ve installed on your roof, and all this re-radiated heat would warm the planet far more than our current carbon levels. This is why many environmentalists are calling for everyone to start painting their roofs white, to reflect heat, not black to absorb.

Not to mention, converting every home and business to solar would require such enormous energy output, we’d rack up a carbon debt that could (according to some researches at the I’ve thinktank quoted in ‘’Freakonomics’’) take 50 years to pay off even if we lived in a completely carbon-neutral society. Since carbon stays in the atmosphere 100 years, that means 150 years of problems before we even began to see results (assuming it worked), which isn’t exactly a solution. And then you would still have all that excess heat to deal with.

The ideal of a world purring quietly along on solar is a nice one to imagine, but the realities of enacting it are not realistic nor even all that attractive. The real solutions are going to come from geoengineering, which is cheap, easy, and effective, not radically overhauling our energy consumption.