You know what--FOX News is Sometimes Kind of Dumb.

Here's a funny exchange about the solar industry from FOX Mushroom Farm:

So--oil subsidies have worked, and nuclear subsidies have worked, and solar could be arguably better (cleaner), but the problem is geography?

"They have a lot more sun than we do".

And well, "Nat. gas has a lot to do with that."

Look, I'm just a simple blogger who occasionally covers science, industry and climate issues because I don't want my species to auto-darwinate. Is it remotely possible that solar never really took off here in the US not because we don't have certain areas of abundant sunshine (Florida, Nevada, Arizona, garsh--just scads of states come to mind), but because we romanticize fossil fuels a bit much? Because when you look at how the US treats oil and coal and natural gas, we kind of have this fantasy that our natural resources are so big. Big, big, big. Big resources; drill here, drill now; more, more, more. Massive deposits. Big payloads. It's almost like we have a sexual hang-up about the size of the energy we could be using. But the sun shines all over.



It's hard to commodify. It's not like we're going to see "peak sun" for something like billions of years. It shines, and if we just captured that energy, all we're really talking about is updating grids and optimizing usage. Sure., the materials for building solar panels themselves need to improve, but think about this--plants have been using carbon-based solar conversion technology for like, always. Could it be more efficient-yeah--but we're reasonably intelligent people, barring the folks who think Germany is sunnier than California.

Also--I'm from a state with abundant natural gas resources--Pennsylvania. I'm also from a state where a fire has burned in Centralia for several decades, now. We're a state that enjoyed an exploitative coal industry, and now is a little overcome by the "frack here, frack now" mentality--and you know what?

I really think we should have farms instead of  fracking. I really think we could do with clean water, instead. Deep down, I don't think we need to prong every aperture of Mother Nature for ergs when at some point, if we totally despoil our landscape, we'll be in a primal fight for freaking calories. And hydration.

Which is why a so-called "news outlet" that can have an expert argue for the advantages sunny Germany has over the old, gloomy US seriously bothers me--even when it isn't shrugging off the appalling failure of democracy when a 102 year old woman of color is made to wait hours to exercize her voting rights, or hiring the woulda-shouldas of politics for its correspondents.  They just go with the bullshit, hoping, even knowing, their viewers might not have the wherewithal to call "bullshit" on them. And that is just tragic.