frflyer

LDK Solar: Now Bottoming?

K. Bofah is so wrong. Oil and other fossil fuels can only go up in price as time goes by. Solar energy costs are falling rapidly and efficiency of solar cells is rising rapidly.
Oil is in fact killing our economy. We give over $80 billion in tax credits and subsidies to oil and gas companies, according to setamericafree.org. Their estimates of the hidden costs of oil are over $800 billion annually. The includes over $100 billion for military protection of oil shipments, environmental damage to health, infrastructure and the environment in general.
Health costs alone are estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars. Solar is already cost competitive in sunny high power cost parts of the country and will be competitive all over the country in the next ten years. One company, Nanosolar says they can already build a PV solar system cheaper than a coal fired plant can be built, and will never need any fuel, ever. No fuel to mine, transport, store, burn, or clean up the mess from. No fuel that anyone can corner the market on. According to a proposal published in Scientific American, we could power the whole country just using solar power plants in the southwest desert areas. They are talking about 1% of our deserts, less area than now used for coal mining.
And they say it can be done, spending less in public money over 30-40 years (about $400 billion) than we spent to build the internet over the last 35 years. And spending way less than we now give oil companies in tax credits and subsidies. Like 1/8 as much. We are giving them that much every 5 years!!!
There are conservative forces filling the news media with disinformation about both global warming and what the real potential for renewable energy is. It has to be one of the biggest propaganda campaigns in history.
They keep trotting out phony lists of skeptical scientists, trying to convince the public that there is no scientific consensus on man made global warming. In fact, the IPCC's 4th assessment on the science of climate change is the most thoroughly peer reviewed scientific document in the history of science. Their findings are supported by every major scientific organization in the world, including the EPA, NOAA. NASA, The Academy of Science, The American Geophysical Union. Dr James Baker of NOAA says that AGU or anthropogenic global warming has more scientific consensus than any scientific theory he knows of, with maybe the exceptin of Newton's second law of dynamics. But go to the Minnesota Republican website and you see big bold banners at the top of the page claiming that AGU is a scam. Talk about Luddites!
Maybe you heard of Senator Inhoffe, R OKA, the leading global warming skeptic in the senate, touting his list of 400 skeptical scientists. It was a complete joke. A padded, laughable list of non scientists, TV weathermen, celebritities, etc. Then you have the announcements of "scientific conferences" like in New York, where supposedly 1500 or so skeptical scientists met. Another phony list. These meetings couldn't be further from a "scientific conference". They or orchestrated propaganda events where right wing propaganda mills like the Heartland Institute "bribe" attendees with offers of $1,000 per speech and $10,000 per paper. These are all expenses paid junkets, that in no way resemble real meetings of scientists, who are never have their expenses paid, and who in fact seldom are even paid for their research. Now we have the #2 man at GM claiming to have a list of 32,000 skeptical scientists. I'd like to know where he gets these numbers, since there aren't enough climate scientists in the world to have that many skeptics, on top of the 99.9% of actual climate scientists who agree with the IPCC