Why don't you show some work on that?

There are thousands of scientists all producing studies that show climate change competing for some of these supposedly huge grants.

There are a few scientists on the denier side getting paid by companies that literally have revenues of trillions of dollars a year, hundreds of billions in profits each year and at lest tens of billions of dollars to win or lose depending on climate legislation.

The overwhelming financial interest for a scientist is to be an industry tool.

This is just epic pot meet kettle.

You discredit every source that is anti your position as a reflex. That is what denialists do, however they immediately accept outlier science on this issue as gospel.

The incentives are to discredit climate change are much larger than to be just one more consensus hump supporting it.

Also the consensus is mostly correct with incremental improvements in understanding, this does not make headlines like the relatively rare times there are complete paradigm shifts.

The US government spent over 100 billion $ the last decade on climate change research. Your telling me publicly traded oil company's are spending more paying off scientist to be deniers?

It is well known and obvious fact that an increase in temperature of the planet will in the short term, increase the productive capacity of the land from a human perspective. This is because the majority of land in the continents is north of the equator and more than a majority of that north of the tropic. That said, judging a net increase of 15 degrees over even a hundred years as a positive is fatality misinformed.

15 degrees? did you mean 1.5?

I mean 15/1.8 degrees in real human (aka murican degrees). And no thats not meant to be scientific fact, it is just obvious if you look at a map.

whether it is 8C or 15F, you've still lost me.

over the past 30 years, temperature has risen at a rate of approx .15C/decade.

This link explains it succinctly: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...limate-change/

He's done a lot of research on this topic.

It's likely climate change has resulted in slightly less deaths due to natural disasters. Far more people die in extreme cold spells versus extreme warm spells, and the former have slightly decreased, while the latter slightly increased.

SUNE was a turd...loaded up with debt and with a poor business model.

Canadian Solar and First Solar are both excellent investments. They have great balance sheets, earn a lot of money, and trade at extremely low multiples.

You certainly know the investing stuff better than I do.

First Solar seems to have been a bit of a roller coaster. Perhaps more of their business model has to do with building solar power plants and less to do with the solar modules they manufacture, but I've never been bullish on thin film.

Canadian Solar has been very popular for a while now - no complaints with the company. But, module manufacturers are vulnerable to any breakthrough - more in terms of lowering manufacturing costs than module technology.

You may well be right in the short or medium term, but I certainly wouldn't buy a solar stock and just let it sit in my retirement account.

As far as SunEdison being a turd comany goes...quite recently I've had a guy trying to get me to do some work for them surveying jobs and possibly installing them and the guy I was dealing with was pretty lame. He wasn't directly an employee of SunEdison, so I can't say for sure it was a bad reflection on them, but maybe.

I think First Solar is the one single company, of the entire universe of companies, I would recommend the most for letting it sit in your retirement account. Their efficiency projections (they just crossed 22% a few months ago) and their overperformance in humid conditions versus their peers mean they have a path to growth -- and it's trading at a deep-value multiple.

Canadian Solar is cheap for a different, sorta lazy reason -- they're holding >$1b in projects on their books right now, and this does not seem to be reflected at all in the price of the equity. The SUNE meltdown has led to people casting aspersion on the build-and-sell model, without noticing that SUNE was alone in being terrible at it.

Foothill Transit in the LA area has 15 fast charging electric buses in operation.



From the wiki on the manufacturer 15 cities are using their buses - Foothill has the most.

No idea the make/model, 2 in operation

Not to be a downer, but unless they are charged with green energy it doesn't make a difference and could actually be worse

Unlikely to stay that way.

Possibly, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Those buses are quite far from a coal power plant if that's what you're thinking. For the most part it's the same fuel as almost every bus in SoCal: natural gas.

Even if the bus was charged with coal power it would emit far less greenhouse gases. Musk goes over this again again again and no one listens. Electric engines not only are efficient, the can regen braking.

The reality is far more energy is produced by photovoltaics than is used by all the electric cars on the road. I once did the calculation, we are approaching 100% of all the cars, buses, and trucks could be powered by solar in California with installed PV power.

Solar is the cheapest form of power, cheaper than coal or nuclear or hydro. FSLR can install solar near $1 a watt on the commercial scale. Whatever it costs to install per watt is a close approximation to cents per kilowatt hour in the long run. Go back to school if you can't do the math. You can do it in your head.

5.5 sun hours a day (most of the west this passes easy)
365 days in a year
$1 a watt installed
50 years average life (Bell labs original solar panel still works fine)

1 watt * 365 days/year * 5.5 hours * 50 years / 1000 watts/kw = 100 kwh

100 pennies in a dollar, $0.01 per kwh.

$0.01 a kwh is far cheaper than the utility charges anywhere in the country.

The Fox news clowns complaining about Solyendra gfy. Although they are right in a way, not that solar does not work, but the government should not be funding these boondoggles.

People do always underestimate the longevity of solar panels. Most analysis uses 20-25 years, when they have shown that the warranties, typically 80% of power in 25 years, are generally good and the diminishing power continues as they age but at a decreasing rate.

$.01/kwh might be overselling it a bit, but the $.04/kwh that's already being banked on is going to keep going down.

One thing I want to add about this is that there's was a huge amount of terribly misleading information about the energy and pollution in the life cycle of the Prius that was put out by opponents and, as always happens, regurgitated uncritically as nauseum.

People don't really talk about that one big comparison between the Prius and the Ford F150 made just a few years later because in hindsight it was so obviously stupid, but pretty much everyone, including most, we'll say, Clinton Democrats, swallowed it whole.

But, it's not *that* big a worry, because as steelhouse, the conservative, will tell you, solar and electric cars don't depend on the green movement anymore. The market for solar is almost entirely (like 99%, like I can't remember the last time a client mentioned anything else) people who want to save money, and electric cars will get there before long.

I drive a prius and the battery is suppose to be replaced at 140K miles. Say it cost $4000 to change the battery. $4000/140000=$0.028 a mile or $1.43 per 50 miles. Assuming it gets 50 miles per gallon. But there are a lot of other things, I have yet to change the brakes and it is at 100K miles almost. It might save some money but not as much as you would think.

Actually I have a Prius and an F150. I had been waiting and waiting and waiting for the Volt, but they kept delaying it, so I got a Prius. I was going to say we keep cars for a long time, so it'll still be years before I think about getting an electric (again - I did do a conversion with a friend a few years ago, but he bought me out), but my 14 year old might inherit the Prius before too long.

The saving money was about solar.

There was some stuff about the F150, but googling and remembering I guess the big story was Prius pollutes more dust-to-dust than the Hummer. It's hard to find the original now, from 2005 or 2006, because there are so many later stories online debunking it.

I know somewhere on 2p2 I was arguing about it at the time. The analysis was including energy costs associated with R&D and flying people over from Japan to train people doing repairs and adding all those factors onto what was then a very small production run. It was non-sense and any new model would rate terribly under those standards, let alone something with new technology.

Can't find the article but in Australia they compared the worse performing electric supercar plugged into Australia's most poluting coal plant and it still had a better carbon footprint than most petrol cars.

The main reason, that they are a good investment ecologically, is that holistic systems do not grow over night. An energy neutral change to solar creates other lateral plays like hooking up your car to said solar and totally cutting out the transmission grid. The more viable each component, the more total savings. Batteries, solar, electric <stuff> all together will shrink the transmission grid which is where 75% of the waste is (total guess statistic, assuming we aren't counting 'wasted sunlight' ).

I don't know what fraction it is, but it's very common for electric car owners here in LA to have solar.

Ya I'm sure its gotta approach 50%+ cause an electric car aint cheap.