I was putting forth a credible resource that pretty much exactly addressed the topic, not trying to argue with what you said.

I guess a useful government regulation would be to require estimates of the energy consumed to make certain energy products available. It would be pretty much impossible to do at the point of sale for things like retail gasoline, but a given fuel distributor shouldn't have too much trouble calculating their average for some period of time (especially if they are getting reasonable numbers from upstream providers).

I talk about gasoline because I think it would be interesting to have numbers for more than just solar panels and liquid fuels are probably one of the more complicated places to do such a calculation. It should be relatively easy for pv manufacturers.