Fund the build out of solar production without worrying too much about profits. Not at a loss, just choose to fund factories that will build solar panels as an investment in the future rather than from a portfolio of competitive investments as an attempt to maximize profit.
"Killing Coal: The Obama Administration’s Intentional Assault on an Industry" http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/19/killing-c...
Please don't kill information simply b/c you disagree with it; otherwise there can no dialogue and ycombinator becomes little more than a billboard for the current dominant political whim.
Is news.ycombinator.com a "real news source"? Should it be renamed to "notnews.ycombinator.com" or such?
Who decides what is and isn't a "real news source"?
Perhaps the judgement:
"breitbart.com is not a real news source."
is an example why so many people were astonished at the election results. After all, if you only talk to people who agree with you then you'll certainly be unaware of those who don't. And when there's a vote, you'll really be surprised!
This attitude is destructive as it's making it so difficult for us to come to any agreement on what we accept as a trustworthy third-party. Where do we start to give people some benefit of the doubt? As it is, even "trust but verify" can appear impossible. I'm not advocating some "can't we all be friends" platitude. As a practical matter, how do we move forward from here?
Edit: minor wording changes to remove generalization and grammar improvement
There's no way to prove objectively which sources are better but we still have to make judgments. The judgment about Breitbart is not a difficult one.
Slate.com does not describe themselves as a news source, so apparently not. I've certainly never thought of them as informative.
I can't personally comment on Breitbart's content, but apparently a number of their employees quit earlier this year, believing that the site has lost its journalistic integrity since the death of Andrew Breitbart.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/21/le...
Time to update my news reading preferences!
edit: I suppose there might be a selection effect. The large networks are watched by everyone, and the smaller ones are sought out.
This website has a higher bias towards both people interested in running a business (and the economic climate around it) and interested in disruptive businesses. We see many articles about Tesla, alterantive energy, energy research, and updates to gas and coal based technology.
As such, the article linked really won't fall on receptive ears. We've got a lot of other sources pointing out how very subsidized the coal industry is and we're all well aware that every time an industry risks losing subsidy it immediately performs a football flop to try and stop that, as it's really quite nice to have the taxpayer help bolster your bottom line.
In general, most Americans polled believe that alternative energy is in fact a good thing to pursue and we have evidence of other first world economies making it work and turning a profit while doing so. When we then put slick and popular corporate branding on alternative energy (Tesla's latest offering, but we could name others if you please) then it gets even more popular.
The denial of coal-based power as a harmful and inefficient industrial revolution technology is a minority opinion in the US, but it gets amplified by groups either losing employment or groups hoping to leverage the fact that people are losing employment.
That's why I think you got downvoted. I am ratelimited on this site, so I couldn't spend one of my few daily posts to respond to you yesterday. I apologize for the delay. But very few people here would go, "Oh, I see!" at that article, as it conflicts a lot of other diverse and less partisan sources that pass over this website daily.
What the Coal industry wants is even more federal handouts. We already give them a ton of money to keep going on the grouds that it's a transition economy and a bridge for the US economy. But the Coal Industry is really damn greedy as a whole.
Even with high profile failures like Solyndra, in general green energy runs at a fraction of the cost. This of course hurts workers, because the labor involved is less well compensated as part of that cost reduction. However, as far as I can tell we're already turning the corner to where (for _generation_, ignoring environmental costs), solar and wind already outperform coal on a cost basis.
People who want to preserve bulk coal generation do so for ideological reasons. From a more "green" perspective, there are more important things we should be doing with our coal and natural gas then burning them to heat water.