Re: green unintended consequences

The first consequence will be to increase the price of the formerly cheaper forms of energy.  Basic law of supply & demand is modified by the regulated utilities.  All generators "offer" kW's to the grid, and the ISO's set the floor price that all suppliers are paid for their portion of the power.  These adjustments are made as often as every 15 minutes.

Reassigning millions of acres of food crops to energy crops will have all the nasty ripple effects of any major disruption in the supply chain. Cattle feed goes up, meat & milk go up... demand for meat & milk drops, cattle stocks get dumped because they're too expensive to feed, milk continues to climb, meat plunges temporarily, then returns to earlier pre-slash highs.  But surplus cattle are now gone.

We waste effort looking to convert cellulose to ethanol, but even *if* we find a new super-enzyme and yeast, plants still only capture 0.01% of the sunshine that falls on an acre of land.  In the mean time the government subsidizes the price of food crops and still pays farmers to fallow land.

PV solar is getting more popular, but prices are continuing to rise, and waiting periods are over a year. 

The new thin film solar aka CIGS is still a precision process, Induim is a scarce element, so is Gallium, and Selenium is toxic.  The Copper is a bargain by comparison.  Manufacturers are spouting $1/W for the cells, but even if they make that goal, the panels are still $5-6/W, and the small 1.5 m^2 panels cost a fortune to install.

 Wind power is clean, and when local geographic conditions support the decision, it can be installed and operated effectively...  Living near a wind farm is as noisy as living in the city.  The blades are huge, and even though they rotate slowly, the tip speeds can exceed 100 MPH.  Birders are up in arms because a tiny fraction of the billions of birds collide with a blade, and litter the grounds around the towers.

Hot Geothermal is another strong technology, but again only a few locations are suitable for exploitation.

 The "No Nukes" group almost got their wish... There hasn't been a new US reactor in 25+ years.  Imagine how much less atmospheric CO2 there'd be if the moratorium/curtain hadn't fallen.

On another board I'm participating on an engineering challende for "new" ways to control mosquito populations in the 3rd world.  At one time vector borne diseases were entirely unknown in the US.  Today we have Lyme, Eastern Equine Encephalitis, West Nile,and the oldies are making a resurgence, Malaria, and you can't own a dog without buying heart-worm medication or risk being charged with animal cruelty.  Yes DDT, killed mosquitoes, and other nasties.  It distinguished the US as a safe and evolved civilization from the insect laden images of desperation we now see to elicit sympathy for 3rd world causes.

Decades ago GE dumped PCB's into the rivers in New York, and that's a shame.  Those sediments had become well sequestered in the intervening decades. Two years ago(?) GE was ordered to dredge up the contaminations, at a cost of billions of dollars, to do what? yup... bury them somewhere! They were buried!  Guess what,  new spikes of PCB's in local fishes... Brilliant!

Now some good news. 

They took Lead out of gas.  Modern instruments can detect lower backgrounds, so now it turns up everywhere we look.  Can't take down a painted wall without a hazmat permit.  Poor kids aren't munching paint chips anymore, but their test scores continue to decline... maybe it wasn't the lead? They make union teachers out of lead don't they? Oops!

 We can't be exposed to asbestos anymore either; the lawyers have seen to that.  My favorite abatement, is when the asbestos is sealed in asphalt tile... asphalt is the essence of "stickyness" it keeps the fibers in place so well it was used as a "bonding agent" for asbestos products.  Today we spend ~100/sq ft to abate asphalt asbestos tiles.  I had a toy mineralogy kit that came with a sample of asbestos, and a sheet with projects and ideas...  Even though the company is long gone, perhaps I can sue the companies that made the cardboard box or printed the instructions. Hmmm...

How about another war story... The war on forest fires, because poverty, illiteracy, drugs, hunger, and terror are not enough.  For decades all fires were fought in detection.  This saves millions of acres of chaparral and other "fuel" growths.  Now when a fire starts there is so muck fuel on the ground the fire can actually sinter the earth, sterilizing the land for years, or until the next big erosion event.

Sorry doc, long post for a short question, buy you knew these answers already didn't you?  The problem is picking the pertinent topics from suck a monumental list of unintended consequences.

Some of the criticisms are harsh, I don't think anyone set out to "mess things up" at some future date.  As I pointed out in another thread, sometimes it's better to leave things alone.  We **must** be vigilant at the outset, and stop asserting 'criminal conspiracy' every time a company makes a decision to do something new... But we should SLAM those that scoff responsibility at the starting gate.