Subsidizing The Sun - The SEIA
and the Solar Lobby vs The Solar
Majority
and the Solar Lobby vs The Solar
Majority
| The SEIA and the Solar Lobby vs The Solar Majority The Solar Lobby and Solar Energy Industries Association take very general names for their organizations, but in fact represent only a tiny and peculiar minority of the uses of solar energy. They are concerned with putting solar heat into pipes and electricity into wires, just like fossil fuels. They disregard the common, everyday uses of the sun. The solar majority go about their lives using the solar products of Mother Nature without ever thinking about it. Food grows in sunlit fields, cattle graze on sun grown grass, wood is cut from solar forests. The sun comes up every morning and the solar majority gets up to make use of it. The solar minority, represented by the Solar Lobby, are determined to get a subsidy for their uses of the sun. They intend to have the rest of us, the solar majority, pay them to do their uneconomic impersonations of fossil fuels. When you consider the thousands of vital uses of the sun (such as delivering an average of 1.5 ft. of fresh water to the surface of the earth every year), you see that we have a largely solar powered economy being taxed to subsidize awkward imitations of fossil fuels. The Solar Lobby does not represent the window manufacturers who allow daylight to enter buildings, but Photovoltaic companies who produce less light for more money. When the energy economists discuss the world’s energy uses, they pretend to include solar energy in their charts; in fact, our use of the sun is so large it cannot fit on the same page. None of these blunders in thinking have serious consequences for the rest of us as long as the market place is given a chance to operate. The trouble starts when these “thinkers” persuade the government to take money from one group and give it to another according to their ridiculous theories. There is no question that the world owes its present wealth to the sun and to the fossil fuel powered machines, but the successes have come (despite a history of subsidies) from naturally economical uses of both, not labored, self conscious impersonations of one by the other. Steve Baer |
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