Letters to the Editor
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Yeah, nonsense
Gulliver writes:
"The only reason [solar panels are] as common as they are is because they're so heavily subsidized, which we can get away with as long as very few people buy them. Even at that they're expensive, but if they were unsubsidized you'd see a fraction of the panels that are out there today. So do we simply subsidize everyone's solar panels? Makes no sense, that would be no subsidy at all because we'd all have to pay higher taxes and electric bills to generate the subsidies, i.e. we'd be "subsidizing" ourselves."
Of course solar is expensive, and of course it would require a massive government undertaking to get more solar collectors on more roofs. Spending the money on solar DOES make sense, because of the urgency of the need to reduce carbon emissions. Solar isn't the only answer. But the environmental impact of putting solar panels on everyone's roofs is very minimal, and doing so would provide a substantial fraction of our energy needs. There are ways of doing this with minimal financial impact (see my post earlier about how the city of Berkeley, CA does it: they pay for your panels up front, then you pay them back over a set number of years with the savings from your electric bill).
As for nuclear: you know very well that nuclear energy is dangerous. I don't care how careful the industry is; any large scale complex technical endeavor will fail occasionally. That's why planes still crash once in a while, no matter how safe flying is relative to other forms of transportation. The difference is, releasing just a bit of radioactive waste into the environment can, depending on the specific isotopes released and other factors, kill or make ill a huge number of people. It's a risk that needs to be very seriously considered, and even if nuclear power is part of the answer to global warming, it is *nonsense* to simply dismiss solar as at least a partial alternative.