Relax. Solar Panels Won’t Give You Cancer
Noise, ugliness and toxic waste are just a few of the myths of solar power.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
We live in an age of both scientific miracles and superstition about science, increasing more or less in tandem. One year we’re creating novel vaccines that arrest a global pandemic, and four years later we’ve got measles outbreaks because people believe nonsense about vaccines, disseminated by the nation’s chief health official.
Solar power is another example. Here is a technology that, rather than digging up fossils and burning them to unleash solar energy collected millions of years ago, miraculously sucks that energy directly out of the sky. Unlike those fossil fuels, it’s harmless, limitless and on balance doesn’t generate greenhouse gases that heat up the planet.