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Clinton Promises 500 Million New Solar Panels
An anonymous reader writes: Hillary Clinton, widely regarded as most likely to win the Democrat nomination for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, has unveiled her campaign climate plan. Speaking at Iowa State University, Clinton said she would set up tax incentives for renewable energy to drive further adoption. She also set a goal of installing half a billion new solar panels within her first term, if elected. Her plan would cost roughly $60 billion over 10 years, and she intends to pay for it by cutting tax breaks to the oil and gas industry. According to The Guardian, "Clinton has promised to make the issue of climate change a key pillar of her campaign platform."
One thing is for sure, the oil companies are going to spend up big on their brethren in the Republican Party to ensure that they get to keep their federal subsidies.
They won't want to lose those, that's for damn sure.
Even though subsidies are about as anti-Republican as you can get, nobody is going to say no to free government money and will do whatever they have to in order for it to keep flowing.
If solar is stored in lead-acid,how does it become environmentally friendly?
You act like Oil Companies care about solar panels.... They don't. Let me explain why...
Solar panels exclusively generate electricity, Oil companies have little to do with electricity. Yea, they sell natural gas to electric producers, but that's the limit of their involvement in electricity production. Natural gas production is not a huge money maker right now, prices are down even though demand is up and there is little expectation that this changes in the next decade. Oil companies don't care about solar panels or wind farms because they don't have anything to do with their core business. Start messing with fuel oil, gasoline and other Oil based industrial production, then you might get some interest from big oil.
Of course this Clinton position is about appealing to the liberal environmentalists. Now THAT does interest Big Oil because this position implies a national energy position that is slanted in a way that impacts the ability of oil companies to produce more domestically. Solar panels don't matter to this, but it's the rest or the implied policy that this solar panel idea betrays.
So you are parroting what really amounts to a "liberal lie", which amounts to a misrepresentation of what is really going on. Big Oil doesn't oppose solar panels... They simply don't care...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I'm kind of wondering where they would all go.
If each panel was a square meter, that's 193 square miles of solar panels.
193 square miles is 0.006% of the surface area of the United States.
Or, if we wanted to only put the solar panels on existing residential roofs -- there are currently about 6184 square miles of residential roof space in the USA. (ref)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Then whose job is it to address global concerns?
You are aware of the idea of the tragedy of the commons, correct?
Do you really expect the free market to magically solve global issues where the problem domain exists in the tens to hundreds of years rather than the next fiscal quarter? Why would it?