Morning Reads for Tuesday, April 25

While I am as big a solar – and alternative energy generally – advocate as anyone to the point where I support it even if it increases power bills AND I support major government R&D spending for it (because I am young enough to remember the 1980s, the last time our government actually invested a lot in basic research before a bipartisan “we need that money for social programs/corporate America should do it!” accord was reached to let that stuff shrivel and die on the vine so other countries could take the lead in basic research in our stead) since when is 260,000 jobs “major”?

And employing more people than Apple, Facebook and Google combined? Big whoop … that is 3 companies. 2 of which do not really make or sell anything tangible (Facebook and Google) in any serious way and the third – Apple – manufactures their products overseas. Note that they didn’t list MICROSOFT or AMAZON. The former has 114,000 employees alone and actually market and sell products that people and companies buy – even if these days you download it rather than buy the disks or DVDs. And Amazon? They have 341,000 employees and are on the verge of another hiring binge! Because buying and selling things requires humans – as opposed to Facebook’s AI bots – to lift and carry stuff.

Finally, the comparison is false anyway. You are comparing an entire industry – solar – to a few select companies from one industry. You would need to compare the solar industry to the entire tech sector: Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, VMWare, IBM, Intel, Samsung America, Sony America etc. And it isn’t even “the solar industry” meaning companies whose main and primary business are related to the solar industry. Instead, this number counts – for instance – the workers for the solar divisions in companies who primarily deal in something else, such as the workers in the comparatively very tiny solar division of Georgia Power, whose coal, oil, nuclear etc. divisions are much bigger.

So calling the solar industry “a major jobs generator” is … fake news. It is in China and Taiwan, it is also to a degree in France – where nuclear power generates 40%! – but in America it is still niche. It shouldn’t be, and it wouldn’t be if we were still the America that we were from the 1930s-1980s that had a government that invested a lot more in engineering, infrastructure and general innovation, instead of one that vacillates between corporatism and social welfare-ism (two things that aren’t that different and have been known to complement and support each other, as the Europeans and Latin Americans have done a great job of showing us from time to time, and in governments that are both left wing and right wing).