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 flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Senta: These boats, sir, what are they for?
Hamar: They are solar boats for Pharaoh to use after his death. They’re the means by which Pharaoh will journey across the skies with the sun, with the god Horus. Each day they will sail from east to west, and each night Pharaoh will return to the east by the river which runs underneath the earth.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“I had always been so much taken with the way all English people I knew always were going to see their lawyer. Even if they have no income and do not earn anything they always have a lawyer.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)