Losing respect for Rand Paul

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But that goes for literally anything made in China... all the cheap clothes and consumer goods we buy. And coal more than anything, were we to continue to use that as a power source. Your issue is with cheap Chinese manufacturing, not the energy industry or any other.

That -is- the solar industry, and if it weren't china it would be someone else.  Even china offshores the worst parts of this process.

And when you build a solar power plant, it produces electricity for decades. You dig coal out of the ground, you burn it, and then you need more coal. One has a fixed environmental cost, the other is constant. It's a massive difference.

Not always......like I said, some panels..in reality..are no more or even less environmentally sound than fossil fuels.

Don;t take my word for it, go on a google safari..let wonder lead you to knowledge.  You'll end up with a more complete understanding of the barriers to a practical sustainability.

 
I know quite a lot about this industry, and if you think solar energy is less sustainable than coal, we'll have to agree to disagree. Remember that everything is manufactured somewhere - if you're telling me that repeatedly mining and burning coal has less of an environmental impact than the one time manufacturing cost of a product that lets us capture energy from the sun, I think you misunderstand entirely the value of renewable energy. It's not like coal grows on trees - it's an extraordinarily dirty product. As is oil, or natural gas, or whatever materials you use. The main difference is, with renewable energy you don't burn the resources you so laboriously produced.

There's a lot of misinformation encouraged by conventional energy companies as they try to stay relevant, but this is something that both logic and data very clearly points towards.