You don’t need to stick a “clean” adjective on to Solar Power like you do with Coal Power. Even though there is no doubt that construction of these facilities has impact on the environment just like construction of a coal fired power plant, there is a difference in fueling the power plant. When the sun shines on this small blue planet, a solar plant starts creating energy. There is no need to scrape the tops off of mountains and dump the fill in the valleys and watersheds as you have to do to fire up a coal power plant. No matter how you treat the emissions of coal fired plant so that you can declare it a clean coal power plant, there is no way to pretend that each morning coal simply falls from the sky to fuel the plant.

We have to be looking at these systems wholistically.