Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[langostino]

"the only reason to go solar"


You've got it completely upside down and backwards.

(1) The energy budget for solar is negative? ("certainly costs more in energy when you figure out how much went into making the panels in the first place"). Dead flat wrong.

(2) It's a "tax entitlement system which costs more than the power produced"? Wrong. It's a subsidy system which provides a far smaller subsidy to solar than it does to oil. If all energy industry alternatives were forced to stop shifting and externalizing costs, and full-cost accounting were employed, solar is actually cheaper.

Bottom line, our society makes economically irrational choices on capital investment and consumption in energy because our crooked and broken political system has created mountains of externalities.

The result isn't just that we expose ourselves to greater geo-political risk, but that we create gross inefficiencies in our economy, and destroy net wealth.