On any given Tuesday, the perfect scenario for writing this weekly note would be having something hit my inbox, or arise in a news feed, that combines—in under a thousand words of brief and readable language—some mixture of

• relevant data
• implications and likely consequences
• opportunities for policy adjustment, market action, and/or personal behavior change

with a view to either mitigating climate change, or aiding cost-effective adaptation. On a perfect Tuesday, I’d then be able to post a note that merely says “Here, read this!” – and this week comes quite close to that ideal, because I just now ran across an August 2025 piece from CarbonBrief.org entitled “Factcheck: 16 misleading myths about solar power.” Yes, this is something I’d urge people to read.

Among the reasons that I have to recommend this posting is that I’m part of the problem that it’s trying to fix. That’s not an easy thing to admit, but in December of last year I quoted a National Academy of Sciences estimate that “by the 2050s, the PV [that is, the photovoltaic solar panel] waste level could reach a staggering 78 million tons.” The CarbonBrief list of “misleading myths” puts that widely cited number in context as part of Myth Number 6, “Energy projects will generate a ‘tsunami of solar panel waste’” – observing that a worst-case number for solar panel waste (projected from 2016 through 2050) is only

• 8.5% of the projected amount of electronic-device waste
• 1.3% of projected plastic waste
• 0.35% of coal ash waste

To put it another way, researchers estimated in 2023 that “we globally produce and manage approximately the same mass of coal ash per month as the amount of PV module waste we expect to produce over the next 35 years.” So, even if that 78-million-ton number were correct, it’s a tiny fraction of the overall challenge of solid waste disposal.

Anyone claiming that solar panels are especially toxic waste is guided by CarbonBrief toward reports of the chemical makeup of coal ash – with components including arsenic, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, lead, mercury and selenium. Coal ash containment failures are not hypothetical, with a rogues’ gallery of examples including “the largest industrial spill in U.S. history [with a] cleanup cost over $1.1 billion” By comparison, solar panels seem a whole lot less scary.

Further, CarbonBrief estimates that solar panel lifetime has increased, since that 78-million-ton number was published in 2016, from roughly twelve years to more like 35 years. Work at the Durable Module Materials (DuraMAT) Consortium is plausibly aiming at a 50-year lifetime – so all projections of solar panel waste are subject to downward trends due to longer lifetimes and improving recycling methods. Unsparing review of the current state of the art in solar panel recycling finds the challenges to be considerable, but concludes that “Hybrid recycling systems combining mechanical, thermal, and chemical treatment currently show strong potential for improving recovery performance.”

Clearly, even my near-ideal week of a single share-worthy item expanded quickly into a portfolio of other research and analysis. Readers would do well to suspect that any single statement related to climate change is subject to verification, or at least corroboration, and that adding context—including “OK, what happens if we don’t take action?”—is a requirement for any discussion at the grownups’ table. In case I haven’t made it clear already, I’m including myself among the targets of that advice.