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Comment by bendykstra | Hacker News Reader

I don't like her analogy in which she compares solar panels to smokestacks. As she points out, smokestacks were not a complete solution to air pollution because they merely moved the problem somewhere else. Solar panels are in no way comparable in that respect. The analogy only works if you consider energy production to be itself a problem.

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"The analogy only works if you consider energy production to be itself a problem."

Welcome to environmentalism.

She could simply be trying to say that nothing is ever free. Conservation of energy dictates you need energy to produce energy, no matter the tricks you use to get energy there is always a cost even if it is not immediately apparent.

If by conservation of energy you're referring to the first law of thermodynamics, then it's completely inappropriate to invoke as an argument for "no energy is free".

The energy in solar power is coming from the Sun. While there are various costs in capturing the radiation, converting it into some other form (like electricity) and shipping it around the globe, those costs have nothing to do with the first law of thermodynamics.

I think this line of reasoning just confuses the argument being made. The law of conservation of energy and the idiom that "nothing is free" are not the same. I believe the argument being made was that resource extraction and manufacturing for the machinery required for generating renewable energy causes as much damage to the environment as using non-renewable sources of energy. Im not sure if that is true, but I don't have the research to support either way. I do think that with more adoption and development of renewable energy, the extraction processes themselves could be made more environment-friendly.

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