this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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When the last tree has fallen and the rivers are poisoned, you cannot eat money.
You are missing the point. Why have you, RamenJunkie not personally set up enough solar panels to provide everyone with all the energy they need? You can't afford it? Well, surely there must be a bank somewhere that would loan you the money. All that electricity would be really valuable. Oh, the bank doesn't think the economics make sense.
One way or another the economic problems need to be addressed and, in order to do that, they must first be acknowledged and understood. That's what the article was trying to do. You can't just sweep it under the rug and figure some sucker will pay for it for the rest of us.
If the private sector can't handle it then the government should do it, preferably with bull shit war machine funds, and provide it to the populace.
And you don't think some kind of economic analysis is necessary before deciding if the private sector can "handle it" or exactly how the government can beat interveine?
You're not exactly wrong about anything, but understanding exactly how the economics break down is important, regardless of how we break down responsibility between the public and private sectors.
Of course this is all academic when the country elects Republicans and the Democrats keep nominating neoliberals. At least with a private marketplace solution it wouldn't get shredded the moment Republicans win power.
I mean, we have had like a decade or more now to prove out that the private sector can't handle converting society to solar.
It's not a binary question though. There is nothing wrong with the government interceding in a dysfunctional market, but the first step should be understanding what broke down and why.
Should the government intervene on the production side or the consumption side? Do we need more windmills and nuclear to compensate for Solar's instability, or just more storage?
Spain did an incredible job converting over to renewals. Then they had an extended outage because they hadn't properly considered reactive power difference between generators and solar/wind generation. Then, of course, the fossil fuel industry turned that into propaganda. Studies matter.