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'There's No Good Way To Kill a Bad Idea' (qz.com)
The world is filled with bad, baseless, factually inaccurate ideas that refuse to die. From an article: Philosopher Russell Blackford, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia, tweeted about this phenomenon earlier this month: "The momentum behind bad ideas can be enormous -- they can plunge on, gathering force, long after receiving devastating criticism." If you've ever found yourself unable to halt someone else's idiotic plans once they were already in motion, you're not alone. Whether you're a politician trying to make congress see sense or simply a manager trying to halt an atrocious team-building plan, there's simply no foolproof way to kill a terrible idea. Blackford blames the momentum behind bad ideas on cascade effects. Yes, individuals are prone to making poor decisions for emotional or biased reasons (known as "cognitive heuristics") and this irrationality is part of the problem. But there's also a broader sociological issue, in that others' opinions carry a huge amount of weight in influencing our views. A cultural consensus -- even without proper evidence -- can form pretty quickly. If one person convinces a second, says Blackford, then a third person will be far more likely to agree with the majority view. This effect exponentially increases with each person who agrees with the others. "We soon have a sociological effect whereby everyone knows that, say, a certain movie is very good or very bad, even though everyone might have 'known' the exact opposite if only a few early voices had been different," says Blackford.
Spoken out of admitted ignorance. Solar creates a lot of pollution in the creation of the panels (some of the chemicals used are very toxic) and energy storage is not trivial. If you want to get technical, fossil fuels are solar energy too, just chemically stored at a very high energy density compared to chemical batteries, and we use fossil fuel because it works at any time as needed.
It has been said before, but the problems with solar energy are significant:
Random, cloudy days that cut your generation potential by 50% or more
50x lower energy density when storing electrical energy in batteries than chemical energy
very high energy losses when compressing a gas to store energy
low energy density when storing energy kinetically
If someone tomorrow commercializes (i.e. comes up with a solution that can be manufactured in scale, not just some lab experiment) a way of storing electrical energy efficiently that comes anywhere close to fossil fuels, solar will take over the planet in a few years. If not, then it won't.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
There is also the fact that it takes more energy to make a solar panel than the panel will get back in its lifetime.
That is incredibly false. Going on basic logical analysis alone, if what you say were the case, they would never have a positive monetary return on investment unless you were manufacturing them in a location with rock-bottom energy prices (say Iceland) and using them in places with sky-high energy prices (Hawaii?). Years of installations in a huge variety of situations shows that they DO have a positive monetary return over their life.
If you want actual data you can search EROEI ("Energy Returned on Energy Invested")
it takes more energy to make a solar panel than the panel will get back in its lifetime.
This is the perfect example of a bad idea that just can't be killed. It may, possibly, have been true back in the '80s. It is not true now, and hasn't been true for a long time. Modern solar panels produce much more energy than the total energy used to manufacture them.
Look up "energy payback time".
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Socialism is "for the collective, at the expense of individual liberty".
No.
Socialism is worker ownership of the means of production.
Most people today seem to have long since lost track of what socialism is actually defined as, but if you're going to be pedantic, be pedantic and correct.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
No one is expecting fossil fuel plants to just be switched off, what most expect is to build new plants of new types to replace old plants as they're increasingly nonviable.
I think you're very mistaken there, many people expect exactly that.