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Cake day: June 25th, 2024

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  • No. If a watt worth of sunlight hits the earth, it’s transformed into a watt of heat. If it hits a solar panel, it’s transformed into some heat and some electricity, which is then used to power something that then transformed it into heat. The only solar energy that doesn’t heat up the planet is the one that is reflected back into space, which, however, isn’t much for solar panels.

    However, if you use a watt of sunlight to power your phone instead of a watt of energy you got from burning coal, this watt of energy instead stays below earth and therefore doesn’t heat up the planet. It also doesn’t release co2, which would otherwise reduce the atmosphere’s reflectivity, trapping even more sun heat on the planet.

    So solar panels don’t reduce the temperature by not allowing sunlight to heat up the planet, they decrease the temperature by replacing other stuff that would otherwise heat up the planet.










  • The issue in Germany isn’t so much that infrastructure needs to be maintained but that a lot of the bridges were built more or less at the same time (after ww2) so they’re now failing more or less at the same time (at the end of their lifetime, no surprise there). Usually, a country doesn’t build so much at the same time, so maintenance doesn’t come all at once.