I had the false impression that green power would be cheaper.
Not only is green power not cheaper - it's actually far more expensive - it's often not any greener at all in the larger scheme of things. Sometimes making one thing clean necessitates making other things more dirty in the process. Often times this not only negates the gains made, but can actually make things worse overall.
If it was a wash financially and a wash environmentally, that would be the minimum threshold to make it feasible to at least shift thinking and create new green industries and economies - but what if all the government spending, tax breaks, and increased rates resulted in no environmental improvement at all? Would we still support the higher energy rates that we're being locked into, which will only increase the cost of living and accelerate rates of inflation?
It's like someone on here who claimed recently that streetcars were zero emission (when the energy needed for them is not) and the cost of operating them was $100 a day per car (when it clearly is many times that). If in the bigger picture you can still end up with a net positive (which you can with streetcars, without the hyperbole), then great - but what people aren't willing to see with the way solar and wind energy is being implemented, is that it's going to be impossible to be anything but a net negative.
The same money invested into actually reducing energy consumption would actually result in measurable reductions in energy usage, rather than charging more for the same usage by a cleaner method. Guess which one actually helps the environment, and guess which one lines the pockets of those in the green energy sector? Spending a billion dollars a year to retrofit high power factor devices into industry, to subsidize lower consumption lighting and power supplies, would save more greenhouse gases in a year than any wind turbine plant could - and not actually make the baseload backup power more dirty in the process. Reducing the need for new energy is a whole lot more practical than simply over charging in order to reduce need, but the former would be reducing revenues rather than adding to them, while the latter is where the money is. If it was about the environment, we wouldn't be seeing these massive energy subsidies which are the only way to make the projects even remotely feasible.
