It takes 17 times more land to feed American pets than would be required by solar farms producing enough electricity to meet all the demand in the United States.

Why do we know this?

A new book by Robert and Brenda Vale, two architects at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, looked into the ecological foodprints of the world's pets, New Scientist reported.

By examining the land and resources necessary to produce the meat and grains that compose pet food they discovered something startling: It takes more than 90,000 square feet of land (that's two whole acres) to feed a medium-sized dog and 16,000 square feet of land to feed a cat.

The Humane Society estimates Americans own about 75 million dogs and 88 million cats. We did the math and found that feeding those animals takes about 294 thousand square miles of land. That's a little bigger than Texas!

That got us thinking, because a favorite criticism of solar power has been to attack the amount of land it requires relative to nuclear or fossil fuel plants. Disingenuous or not, the idea that solar takes up too much land is widespread. For example, Senator Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a long-time nuclear supporter, decried "energy sprawl" in a Wall Street Journal editorial last month.

The amount of land required to generate electricity for the nation does sound like an awful lot, sometimes. One recent calculation led by Vasilis M. Fthenakis, an environmental engineer at Columbia University's Center for Life Cycle Analysis, found that you'd have to cover 16,602 square miles (.pdf) of land in the southwestern desert with solar energy converters like cadmium telluride photovoltaic panels to generate the 3,816,000,000 megawatt-hours of electricity used in the United States every year. (Other estimates have found smaller solar land needs.)

That's why it's important to compare solar's land requirements with other American practices. Multiply anything by the scale of the United States and the numbers start to sound absurdly big. When feeding our pets takes 17 times more land than feeding our supposedly rapacious electricity demand, it's difficult to argue that energy sprawl, for solar, is a major problem.

See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.**