I saw the story myself this morning, and it didn't seem so much biased as simply incomplete.  This may be due to the limitations of a typical story on the evening (or morning) newscasts.

If I were the homeowner with the trees, I'd consider appealing a law that requires me to cut down trees that had been there for quite some time because the neighbor wants to use solar panels.  It doesn't seem right that your neighbor can make a unilateral decision that forces you to cut or trim your trees whether you want to or not.  The story didn't explore whether there were alternate ways of installing the solar panels on the property that didn't encounter interference from the trees.

The way the story was worded, it didn't seem to me that Mr. Solar Panel made any effort to negotiate a compromise.  If that isn't liberalism at its finest, I don't know what is. 

When you put the clowns in charge, don't be surprised when a circus breaks out.

Go ahead and cut the tree down, making sure it "accidently" falls onto the neighbor's roof. Then install mirrors on your roof, reflecting the sun onto the side of neighbor's house so that his solar panels provide only enough energy to cover the cost of air condidtioning....

I've always chuckled at the promotion of solar panels as a "Green" alternative for electricity generation. Do you know how much energy it takes to produce solar panels? Far more than any panel can ever produce in return.

The main component a solar panel is the “cell “, which is made primarily from monocrystalline silicon. This is a highly purified form of silicon that doesn’t exist in nature. You don’t just pick up silicon and spread it out to make solar cells; it requires semiconductor silicon crystals, similar to the silicon wafers used in microprocessors. This form of silicon is produced by melting and purifying the silicon and cooling it in such a way that the desired crystalline structure is produced. That requires enormous amounts of heat and a carefully controlled cooling process to produce the appropriate crystalline structures and create just one component of the cell.

The cells produced are not very efficient, rarely achieving 10 percent efficiency rates. That’s mean only 10 percent or less (usually a lot less!) of the available sunlight is converted into electricity. Each cell can only produce a small amount of current, so it takes a lot of cells chained together to generate a significant amount of useful energy. Because of the inefficiencies of solar cells and the high energy requirements need to create them, it would take thousands of years for a solar panel to generate the equivalent amount of energy that was required to produce that panel and reach the break-even point.

In other words, by using solar panels instead of conventional energy sources like coal or gas, you’re actually wasting thousands of times more energy that you can possible save and you end up using far more fossil fuels that you normally would otherwise. Instead of producing less pollution, you’re producing hundreds of times more. Just how “Green” is that?

And what about the fact that trees provide shade, and in California I'd guess that would be a good way to save on air conditioning costs. Not to mention that trees provide oxygen and reduce CO2 in the air.

These environmentalists are totally schizophrenic. Not to mention short-sighted and just plain stupid. When people start regulating where the sun shines - well, you can guess how I feel about that. Typical libs. Think that they're in charge of everything including who gets to have sunshine and who doesn't. All in all a delicious conundrum.

P.S. Thank you for your information, Cobra. But for the lib environmentalists it's more about feeling good about what you're doing than it is about actually accomplishing the goal. 

I am the exotic Queen Mum, and I approved this message.

This thing is like Alberto Gore who uses more energy than any 200 of the rest of us, but who insists that it is us who must, shall, will buy carbon credits from him in order for us to allay our, not his, environmental sins.

These people are nuts, and if we are lucky, will eat each other before they kill the rest of us off.

I seriously hope ya'll are saving some of these freeze-frames of Katie Couric with that "Greener Than Thou" inset- you could post them again years from now when it is discovered how much of a fad this whole thing was, so the world could have a good laugh. 

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Grizzly Bear '08

Hopefully the trees in question were California Redwoods or some endangered species.  Anybody got a pair of spotted owls to lend the homeowner?  An expanded environmental impact statement could take a couple of decades to resolve.

"Fighters are fun but bombers make policy"