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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

What is even more amazing is how many of Australia's politicians have been in the pocket of coal barons and yet they put up barely any struggle against solar adoption. Compare that to places like California where they've been fighting tooth and nail against green power.

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> they put up barely any struggle against solar adoption

They put up plenty.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2024/o...

As with climate change, there comes a point where the propaganda just stops working becuase it's impossible to contest.

What's funny is that Australian-born Rupert Murdoch has been far more effective in the US than in Australia on this front.

The propaganda is still going really strong in the US. Talk to the population and 1/3 to 1/2 will happily tell you that EVs have fully failed and are being abandoned and will never gain traction in the future. And solar? Lol. Even the people who are saving money with it tend to refuse to talk about it due to the cognitive dissonance.

I thought it was the opposite; it's blindingly obvious that everyone should be getting rooftop solar. The only thing holding me back is the need to work with the condo association on a new roof first.

In the US there are certainly cases where the install costs are just too high and the local utility too hostile to solar for the system to make sense.

This is a really important reason why it's not actually obvious that everyone should be getting rooftop solar - not everyone lives in a situation where they can make arbitrary capital improvements to their roof, or even owns their own roof to begin with (I personally live in a rented apartment in a building where the roof space is shared among many tenants). That doesn't mean rooftop solar panels are necessarily a bad idea for people who can do it - it's quite possibly a good idea. But solar panels ultimately require a lot of land area to generate power, and it's often better to use cheap land for this far outside urban areas, than it is to try to put solar panels on the limited sunlight-facing land available in urban areas.

In Australia now, you don't actually want to install rooftop solar. You want to install batteries. No point getting solar when you can charge your battery for free. You just have to ensure it is sized for winter so you don't end up paying the much higher fees for power during non-free periods.

Trump being elected, twice even, is testament propaganda works better than truth.

> What is even more amazing is how many of Australia's politicians have been in the pocket of coal barons and yet they put up barely any struggle against solar adoption.

More than 80% of coal mined in Australia is exported. So reduction of coal consumption internal to Australia has only a limited impact on Australia's coal industry.

Long-term, adoption of green power in emerging markets and developing countries is a huge threat to Australia's coal industry – but there is very little Australian industry lobbyists can do about that. And whether Australia goes down that route has only limited influence on whether the coal importing countries will.

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