Do you have sources as to why they are lies? I'm not doubting you, but simply saying they're lies is just as disingenuous as the people making the statements in the first place

This is an HN comment thread, not a peer-reviewed paper on "lies convenient to the fossil fuel industries".

However, for your convenience, I used google to search for "are solar panels net energy positive" and found this as the 2nd link:

https://www.solarmelon.com/faqs/solar-panels-use-energy-manu...

This contains a link to at least one peer-reviewed paper:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3038824

I can almost guarantee that a similar process will elicit similar answers for every other point in the GP's list.

This is an HN comment thread, hence we expect a higher quality of comments than elsewhere on the Internet. Thanks for the links.

I think there is more of an expectation here to Google simple things for yourself rather than condescendingly ask for a source that is a few keystrokes away.

Everyone can search things on the Internet. However when I state something on HN, I usually try to add some good links, which are not top Google results. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38725734.

Well quite frankly, saying "the claim that these are lies are just as disingenuous as the claims themselves" is a pretty low quality, classic stick-in-the-spokes "debate" tactic that essentially hand waves the ball back in the other person's court with minimal effort or contribution or real debate and puts maximum onus on someone else in public in the "flow" of discourse.

This is "great" for televised debates but this is kind of passive aggressive for the tone people prefer here. We're talking to people here. More directly than a formal debate.

Someone participating earnestly knows they are capable of either politely expressing interest and asking for sources, or as another mentioned: typing and clicking all by themselves.

> saying "the claim that these are lies are just as disingenuous as the claims themselves"

I didn't say that, but I do think that providing links is helpful.

quote: simply saying they're lies is just as disingenuous as the people making the statements in the first place

paraphrase: the claim that these are lies are just as disingenuous as the claims themselves

claim: I didn't say that

I confess that I can't quite see the difference.

I'm not @jairuhme.

Ah, entirely fair point! :) Sorry about that.

The opinion that HN has particularly high quality comments is always surprising to me. Outside of the times where the person commenting is the actual creator of whatever the post is about I've found comments here to be a dumpster fire to the point where I often have fun looking at them specifically because they are often so wild and I love a good mess.

I assume people here will disagree but it's that exact stark difference in perspective that's so interesting to me

I definitely noticed that the quality of the comments here is often better than simply stating some opinion. The latter is typical for social media echo chambers but not here.

I agree with everything you said, yet I still believe HN comments are regularly the most high quality on the internet. Do you know anywhere that has better comments than HN?

Yes, you can't ask for sources. Either you believe it blindly or stfu.

If solar panels were a net energy negative, they couldn't be made and operated for a profit[1]. It's such an obvious lie, it's just painful.

Very early solar cells, the type used to power calculators and the like, may have been so inefficient that their lifetime power generation didn't offset the energy cost of their production. That doesn't matter because the scale is tiny, and the portability and the elimination of batteries is the point, not net energy return.

Someone probably got it in their mind that "solar can't work" back in the 1960s or 70s based on this, and refused to budge half a century later when solar is the cheapest form of grid-scale energy.

[1] This is actually a great way to estimate the total energy that went into a product. It must be less than the wholesale price (or cost-of-manufacture), otherwise at least one profit-motived organisation must be selling the product, its raw materials, or the energy inputs below cost and losing money on purpose. Only in rare cases like gov subsidies, state-owned corporations, etc... is this rule violated.

The cases you describe in your last paragraph are not rare by any means — they’re everywhere, since all of the western world has seen a move towards bigger governments and socialism in the last decades.

I can provide many sources for each point, let me know if there's a specific one that you find questionable.

Calling every dumb argument against the mainstream climate movement a "lie" without further explanation is the kind of "pick a side" logic that entrenches climate change deniers.

1. Yes, solar panel production is not particularly good for the environment but not any more so than many other common industrial processes and the panels themselves are perfectly safe. Yes that used to be true decades ago, but not anymore. For many years now solar panels generate more energy than they took to make after just a few years operation. Yes, but the fact that they are not particularly recyclable doesn't matter at all because we are never going to run out of sand.

2. Yes, EV's can have larger carbon footprints that ICE vehicles in the few areas where almost all electricity is from coal. But outside of that specific case EVs are always at least slightly better, typically by 20-30%.

3. Yes, it can be argued that lithium mining is worse than oil/gas drilling but it's not clear cut and would only be worse for the local environment if at all. The effect on climate of oil and gas drilling is always going to be far far worse.

4. No, Solar/wind prices are clearly falling and more solar/wind gets installed every year.

5. Yes, solar/wind are intermittent, so they can't be used alone, but work great when paired with investment in longer transmission lines, grid storage and non-intermittent carbon free sources.

For point 6 I can only say that people are will be less likely to make blanket denials if you tell them the truth in a non-judgemental way, respect their intelligence, and are forthcoming with the problems and challenges of addressing climate change.

I believe that it's only thin film solar panels that have high heavy metal content but mono-crystalline panels - which are now the super-dominant technology having drastically decreased in cost - are fairly non-toxic.

I thought 1 was potentially legit depending on how they are manufactured and where they'll need deployed. I understand that 80% of solar cells are produced in China which still gets most of its energy from coal so there is a huge carbon footprint. If you now deploy those in a place that doesn't get much sun, like Germany, the equation isn't great. I'm no expert on this though and am mostly parroting Peter Zeihan on this.

Even Chinese panels in Canada have a energy payback of less than 2 years

PDF link to a study comparing different installation countries: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

Thanks for sharing!

A lot of what you just said is false