IT’S ABOUT NO POLLUTION 

Pick up any newspaper, take a look at any news page on the internet, listen to the weather forecast on the radio or watch the weather on your TV. They’ll all say the same thing somewhere in their reports. “Our world is getting warmer and dirtier year by year,” and this is happening because of our misuse of our atmosphere! Just drive into any of our cities and you can see that kind of dirty looking grey/yellow bubble resting in the air over that city. That’s called air pollution, folks, and it’s there because we put it there.
Just because we can see it over our cities and not over the entire surface of this earth doesn’t mean its not there. It is there and it acts as a filter to keep our pollutants and the heat produced along with them down here close to the ground where they can do the most harm! At the same time as we have built all of the systems that produce that pollution we have been busy cutting down the trees that were originally cleaning the air and extracting those pollutants.
So here we sit, we’ve polluted the air and filled it with dirt and gotten rid many of the trees that originally cleaned it.  We’ve therefore also raised the mean temperature and as a result are watching the polar ice caps and glaciers that helped to control the overall climate of the whole world melt and shrink. As this ice and snow melts the oceans are rising and this increases the surface of these oceans allowing more evaporation and therefore more rain. The result? Vast climate change, the spread of tropical diseases into areas that never had them before, the loss of vast areas of coastal residential, industrial and agricultural land and the loss of many species of plants and animals (remember the dinosaurs)?
OK, it’s here, we’ve got it, so now what do we do with it?
Well, I think that first we have to look at where this pollution comes from and work on that. Automotive, rail, air and sea-going transportation are good places to start but the various manufacturers are already busy fixing that pollution source. So lets take a look at our electrical power systems and start with alternative energy production methods and systems. Methods and systems like rivers, winds and the one source of all power - the sun.   OK, rivers first.  For over a century we have been building dams and hydropower generating systems and although they work rather well, we have proven that we cannot build these massive plants fast enough or big enough to satisfy the need.  Sorry, but that’s a fact. We’ve even tried to use coal to generate power but wow! look at what we do to the atmosphere with the coal smoke.  Next let’s look at the winds. Great system - a little expensive to begin with but the payback is short as long as the towers don’t blow over and as long as we can find places to put the towers and the turbines. That’s for commercial power production, but for the small volume domestic production there are some very efficient and reliable wind turbine and battery combinations that can pay for themselves in a very short period of time. These can even be used on pleasure and commercial boats and ships.  

Then we should have a look at the very best answer of all. That is the solar panel. It produces electric power from the energy extracted from sunlight without reducing the light. It occupies space that cannot be used for anything else, (like the roof of your house or any other building that’s close by) It has a reasonable payback period and it lasts for a long time with little or no maintenance! Without a doubt the wind turbine and the solar panel are the two most attractive and efficient methods of producing electrical energy for almost any application without producing pollution of any kind. In the case of the solar panel, they can even be used on the roof of an RV or in their folding or rollup form by backpackers or hikers. These come in rugged models. Some can even be run over by heavy trucks and or have holes shot in them and still produce power!