Solutions we can Barely See…
Iowa Thin Film Technologies has been manufacturing thin-film solar panels for over 30 years.
Paper-thin solar cells require only an industrial printer to manufacture and are inexpensive to produce.
Are solar panels as thin as a sheet of paper science fiction? No, not by a long shot. But maybe the better question is, why haven’t we been hearing more about them?
An MIT research team was researching the technology in 2011, while an Aimes, Iowa company has been manufacturing them since the 1990s. Source
In November 1989, NASA’s Glenn Research Center awarded Iowa Thin Film Technologies with a $50,000 contract to research the potential for a lightweight and flexible thin-film solar cell that uses amorphous silicon as a semiconductor source, for air and space applications. Source
Iowa Thin Film Technologie has been selling thin, flexible solar panels for over 30 years.
There are a few takeaways here. For those of you who have read some of my previous work in the field of sustainability, I have often observed that there are far more solutions currently out there than meet the eye.
When I first started turning my attention to solutions for climate change and other sustainability issues currently plaguing Mother Earth, I was astonished to find solutions hiding around every corner that are not nearly as well-known as their counterparts, the problems.
There is more than “hope” for a positive future. There is more than a “fighting chance” to achieve a carbon-neutral Earth. The more I look, the more it seems as if too many climate change discussions are biased towards gloom and doom. It’s time to reverse that trend by objective observation ~ the thing which science is best at, but journalism tends not to be.
On more than one occasion, The New York Times has reported on what it refers to as the “Bad News Bias” in American journalism. I feel that is often true for environmental news as well. That’s not to say the statistics are misleading. For example, I understand that 450 ppm of Co2 in the atmosphere is the tipping point, and we’re on pace to reach that in the 2030s. Here’s a Reuters article ominously titled, “Climate change targets are slipping out of reach.”
That may be true; it probably is. Yet the barrage of doomsaying headlines and predominance of negative stories of this ilk seem to add fuel to the fire of despair. Meanwhile, paper-thin solar panels are much less ubiquitous in the media.
Like paper-thin solar panels, the solutions are almost invisible, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
At Project Drawdown: 100 solutions to Reverse Global Warming, Paul Hawken and team have compiled an extremely comprehensive list of climate change solutions. These actions would not only curb global warming but reverse it, and get us to “Drawdown,” the year when Co2 emissions begin to decrease. What’s even more incredible is that the one hundred solutions included in their plan are all profitable solutions.
Here are Drawdown’s top ten solutions to reverse global warming:
- Hi-tech Refrigeration
- Onshore Wind Power
- Reducing Food Waste
- Plant-rich diets
- Tropical Forest Protection
- Access to education for women and girls
- Family Planning
- Utility-scale Solar
- Silvopasture
- Rooftop Solar
Number six is “access to education for women and girls.” Along those lines, I’d like to see more access to education about solutions to global warming that are already being implemented. I think a big psychological factor is how the conversation is evolving. If the existing solutions were as in-our-face as the warnings, I believe the tone of the conversation about climate change could itself reach a tipping point. That’s why I write articles along these lines.
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Tom Tortorich is a Public Speaker on Reversing Climate Change, and has trained with Project Drawdown: 100 Ways to Reverse Global Warming. Tom also hosts the Stories from the Future podcast, and is an author in the genre of optimistic speculative fiction known as Positive Futurism.
