The current solar income of the Earth, or an ecozone or ecoregion or any area, is the amount of solar energy that falls on it as sunlight. This is thought important in some branches of green economics, as the ultimate measure of renewable energy.
Buckminster Fuller first described the concept in his 1970 paper Cosmic Costing, contrasting the photosynthesis on which natural capital and sustainable infrastructural capital depend, with the chemosynthesis of extracting and using fossil fuels.
Paul Hawken is a more recent advocate of the concept, and views it as central to his notion of a restorative economy. It remains a popular notion among those who believe that toxic waste and maintenance problems of direct solar energy devices can ultimately be overcome, or that yields of passive or biological means of gathering and using this energy as biofuels can be made to approximate those of fossil fuels.
Famous quotes containing the words current, solar and/or income:
“The current of our thoughts made as sudden bends as the river, which was continually opening new prospects to the east or south, but we are aware that rivers flow most rapidly and shallowest at these points.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Our civilization has decided ... that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men.... When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism—that true Socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. In the democracy of the caffè or the street the great question of our life has been solved, and the brotherhood of man is a reality. But it is accomplished at the expense of the sisterhood of women.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)