It's thanks to those 'selfish pricks' who took a risk putting solar on their roofs that R&D in solar continued. Solar panels cost ten times less now because of the subsidies and R&D, and the prices are still falling fast.

Whilst the subsidies may have cost a few billion, solar panels in the future will save literally trillions in energy costs.

Battery technology is also progressing fast, in a few years we will have home battery systems that cost a fraction of the Tesla home battery system - several companies are about to join that market - a market that practically never existed before.

You're looking at it wrong, the politicians and the 'greenies' aren't. The exponential growth of solar is about to change the world.

Price history of silicon PV cells since 1977 - Price per watt

Cost Of Solar PV Will Fall To 2 Cents/kWh In 2050, Says Fraunhofer Study

Are Facebook tagging people who don't have Facebook accounts if their face is in a photo?

Seems like a breach of the data protection act - keeping details (face, place, time+date, more(?)) on a person who has not agreed to their T's & C's.

I guess, and what about dolphins and fish crossing borders, how are we going to stop that or issue passports to fish?

Shouldn't we be making sure that unicorns, fairies and dragons get passports - after all, they were first.

Why are robots jumping the queue?

There is no AI that has common sense, it's a fantasy.

And most of all:

Robot != AI

A robot is a machine that sits in a factory making cars.

AI is mostly software which sits in a computer typically in a university or corporate lab.

Please quit with calling AI robots.

Cars.

An incredibly crap method of transport, two tons heap burning fossil fuels - wasting most of what they burn.

Most of the population do not seem to be able to think rationally about cars.

Why do people today think they are entitled to a large share of finite resources?

There's virtually no scientific basis I can see where people are incapable of perceiving long term threats,

Over-population.

People know it's happening but they are not willing to think rationally about dealing with it - some other country has to do it.

I think Population controls should be based on country size minus land above N height. Britain and Japan are obviously over-populated - from a sustainability point of view.

it will probably survive global warming

Probably, but not definitely. We do not know how life on this planet will end, or what man-made or natural extinction events are to come. For all we know Venus might have had life once.

The worst case scenario for too much CO2 release is ocean acidification kills most ocean life, which then rots - it's then eaten by organisms which emit hydrogen sulfide, which then kills us humans because it screws up the air we breath and breathing is kind of essential to living.

It's happened before.... Maybe.

Maybe we should try not to f**k with the planet since we clearly don't know what the outcome will be.

The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct | Motherboard

Permian-Triassic extinction event

Worst Case Climate Change (2008 TED Talk) - YouTube

The worst ones

?

People that can see where the world is headed and can see what the threats are are bad because?

Or are you just attempting to bunch together people who have their eyes open with the gullible fools who believe everything that prison-planet comes out with?

the downside the image is probably not going to be 3D and it sounds like the person taking the pictures with the drone will not be the engineer who inspects them.

And a drone won't know if the lighting is good or if the wrong part of the pic is blurred. Will the quality of the photos be high enough to zoom in if needed? ... having read the article, the answer is no - the pictures are not of high enough quality, the system is still in the design stages...

And what happens if the engineer is not happy with the quality of the photo - will the plane still be there to inspect? If there are less engineers needed and if an engineer complains about the quality of the photo then do they risk losing their job?

You got something against GMO?