"I was astounded to learn that total energy independence (EI) could be attained with only a 5 square meter solar panel system per person!!!"

That's only true if you're willing to greatly reduce everyone's energy consumption.

The following are best-case highly-optimistic numbers.

A 5 square meter area receives about 5000 watts in full sun. The best PV panels might reach 20% efficiency, so you might wind up with 1000 watts output.

In CONUS you might get lucky and live in a place where the equivalent solar energy works out to about 6 hours of full sunlight per day.

So that 5 square meter panel gives you about 6 kWH per day. That's about 60 cents worth of electricity at 10 cents per kilowatthour.

"How expensive are panels today?"

Figure about $10 per watt for good quality panels with control system, cables, hardware, etc. So that 1000 watt panel would cost about $10,000. And you get about $200 worth of electricity from it per year. That's a 2% return on investment.

"Second, U.S. EI would require only 500 square miles, or only 10 square miles per State!!!"

Not that simple. Some states get a lot more sun than others. Some states have a lot more people than others.

A square mile is about 2.6 million square meters.

500 square miles is about 1.3 billion square meters. Allowing for 300 million Americans, that's a bit less than 5 square meters each. Which gives each American just 6 kilowatthours per day.

And those 6 kilowatt hours per person per day would have to cover all business, government and industrial uses, too, from streetlights to TV broadcasting transmitters to trolley cars to internet servers, water pumping and purification. So lets say half of those 6 kilowatt hours per person per day are used by those other uses, and each American gets the other half for personal use.

"Seems in both cases these are trivial."

Nothing is ever difficult for the person who doesn't have to do the work.

Here are the big, nontrivial questions:

Can your family live on 3 kilowatthours per day per person? Remember those 3 kilowatthours per day per person have to cover all personal energy uses - lighting, heating, cooling, transportation, cooking, computing, etc. Take a look at your last electric bill and see how much you actually used. Are you willing to cut that use down while eliminating all other energy sources?

Are you willing to invest the money for the panels and other equipment for each family member?

In real life, the panel sizes mentioned are off by at least a factor of 10. So figure 5000 square miles of panels, not 500, and an investment of $100,000 per person, not $10,000. And see if you can live on 30 kilowatt hours per person per day, for all uses.

"I'm not willing to invest in PV's because I think they are in the R & D stage and I'm not willing to bankroll development."

PVs are well past that stage, but are constantly improving. You can buy quality PV systems, from the panels to the regulators to the batteries.

That doesn't mean PVs are the best choice for *you*, however. The big question is how much return-on-investment a PV system would give you, compared to investing the same money in other technologies (wind, insulation, etc.) In Michigan, the answer is very likely not to be PV.

"I am convinced that changes in behavior and lifestyle can save more energy and reduce pollution more than any laws or technology, but have to bet against my fellow man's willingness to make the changes due to greed, laziness, vanity and fear."

Add ignorance to that list. Also boy-who-cried-wolf phenomenon.

"I've watched energy, land or other valuable resource saving efforts completely overwhelmed, or currently becoming overwhelmed, by rising population numbers."

That's the ultimate problem, and the ultimate choice. We can either choose to limit our population to match the available resources, or the available resources will do it for us.

That goes against the grain of many Americans, for whom "growth" is synonymous with "good". But as Edward Abbey said, "growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of a cancer cell".

"Cheap energy has ALWAYS had the same effects: to raise population further, to encourage driving more and make ostentatious and conspicuous consumption more attractive."

And to make conservation and efficiency technologies not cost effective. If electricity from the grid is three cents per kWh, there's just no way solar can compete. If it's thirty cents per kWh, it's a different story.

"If we don't grow up soon we will be facing some terrible choices."

If we're lucky. We may not have choices.

Thirty years ago, the Carter Administration tried to get the USA going in the right direction. But Americans didn't like that idea, and when the supply of energy stabilized in the early 1980s those old ideas were largely forgotten. It was somehow unAmerican to even talk about limits, about conservation, about living a minimal-impact lifestyle. Instead it was Morning In America, and we needed to focus on Star Wars/SDI and helping the Afghan "freedom fighters". That didn't quite turn out as hoped...

Now the cycle repeats.