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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

The only negative thing I feel about all of this is that we're doing now. Once the glaciers are farked, the snow is going and the mass die offs are started. Better late than never they say, but why the hell didn't we just invest in this in the 1990s?

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Solar panels were expensive and not very efficient then.

Do you think more investment / subsidies weren't possible over the last few decades?

They were and Germany was actually going in that direction, but it took the manufacturing scale of China to create an incentive to introduce the hundreds of minor changes necessary to get costs down.

Don't discount the importance of cheap Chinese (mostly coal) electricity.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/02/18/chinas-cheap-electric...

If it is so cheap why does your source say it was subsidized?

That's not a contradiction. From the point of view of the factory or household consuming it, it is cheap.

germany stoped the investment and killed the solar industry. Not saying that China helped too, but we don't know if germany would have pushed through it without China.

That only happened after China started eating their (and Japan's) lunch. There's a great old chart which shows this:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:5_Largest_Producers_...

Right around that time Germany's solar boom started in earnest:

https://www.statista.com/chart/2397/solar-power-made-massive...

Which was powered largely by Chinese panels. Since we can't have nice things, tariffs were imposed:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_13_...

Lobby from the other people selling energy: the not green type. They have the money, the lawyers, the ads, everything. Balcony solar power is only allowed now due to energy shortage.

Balcony solar has been allowed for a number of years in Germany.

We did invest, starting in the 1970s, which is what brought the prices down so much. It just took time to get the R&D to the point where they were cost competitive.

The social problem is that fossil fuel usage was very profitable and employed enough people that polluters were allowed not to pay for externalities and a lot of climate change denial funded by the oil companies proved effective at getting politicians and the public to downplay the risk. Even today, even on HN, you can find people who’ll say it’s no big deal, the earth has been this warm in the past, that it’ll cost too much, that they can never drive an EV because their daily commute is 11 hours each way without stopping, etc.

Because fossil fuel lobbyists so successfully captured most right-wing parties, millions of people added that to their self identity and thus will struggle to admit they were wrong because that more or less means admitting that the same people who lied to them about the climate also lied about other things.

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