Solaris two.

Posted by Pointman on July 21, 2017 · 19 Comments 

I wrote an article on solar power five years ago which since then has racked up 10k+ Facebook shares and according to WordPress statistics, 395,316 page views with 90,386 of them in the last week alone. Oh, that all of my humble blogging efforts could leap upwards towards a ring of such dizzying heights. I’m not particularly interested in the fate of anything I write, it sinks, swims or paddles along on its own merits. I kicked it off but from then on, it’s on its own.

The trick of the thing is to just write what you’re thinking and let the pieces fall where they will, irrespective of the numbers. I have no illusions about anything I do here, which makes me a free man. The mob will always be the mob, like a social media momentum goliath you have no understanding of that rushes from corner to corner, from pillar to post with some sort of appurtenance of life all of its own.

That’s the ultimate freedom of blogging, and while five years down the line is a long time, a reread does give you a moment of pause to revisit that person you were then but a few scant heartbeats ago. I can see exactly why I went after solar energy.

There are a number of so-called renewable sources of energy, but solar seemed to me to be such an obvious scam that it begged to get an exposé. Every which way I looked at it, it was a scam. For starters, it promised free energy forever and at no charge, and that basic promise should have been setting alarm bells off with anyone over twelve and three-quarters who’d ever been tricked out of their dinner money placed into your little hand by a loving mommy.

When the sun is shining, you get electricity, when it ain’t, you ain’t either. Even a thicko can see the essential flaw in that one.

Hey Kiddo, I’ve just invented this here perpetual motion machine I’m totally sure you’ll want to get into on the ground floor. Gimme a few more little bucks to develop it, and it’ll become a glorious reality, despite those stick in the mud boring skeptics who’re so negative about such enlightened things. You, by plighting your troth on our side, have a grand opportunity to punt all that skeptic sensibility into the rough where it belongs and save the planet at the same time.

You just know it makes sense.

It was so corrupt, so dishonest, so rigged and fundamentally a load of rubbish that was being sold by every shyster from every corner of the big green money machine that it begged for a takedown, if only in arrears and after all the money had been squirreled away.

The pimped out academics loved it because the scientific papers they were grant-bribed to produce recommended it without exception, the business sector analysts wanked themselves into near exhaustion over the future profits to be made out of it, the media righteously condemned oil and gas back to the industrial revolution and the guys pitching the IPOs or flotations of the solar plumbs picked up their easy commissions and buggered off, not caring if they were flogging a load of rubbish or not to gullible punters. Mostly, it was indeed rubbish.

The big player, the government, got in on the act with no strings attached loans, loan guarantees or just straight give them the dosh and we’re sure they’ll deliver free energy for the next millennium. As usual, the government was being very generous, since they were actually putting into play in a shark’s market other people’s money – that’s to say yours – and they lost the lot. Every cent of it. Not once, not twice, but on and on, to the point where they could no longer afford to keep shovelling money, your money, into the maw of the beast whose insatiable appetite for it ensured none of it was ever vomited back up its throat.

They took everything that governments were stupid enough to keep giving them, and asked for more every time so they could keep on striving towards the fabled land of free energy, while all the time delivering precisely bugger all – and where they’re still being allowed to do that, they’re still doing precisely that.

Not millions, not billions and billions, but trillions and trillions every damn year. Year after year. Money handed over, hand over fist that with a fraction of which we could have done so much with to alleviate some small fraction of the sum total of human misery around the world.

All those once fabled names are there.

Solyndra, Solar Millennium AG, Energy Conversion Devices Inc, Q-Cells, Solon, Solar Millenium, Solarhybrid, Ener1, Range Fuels, Beacon Power Corp, First Solar, JA Solar, Suntech, Odersun, Conergy, Sunways, Scheuten Solar, Solar-Fabrik, Sovello, Solar Valley, Abound Solar, Centre for Solar Excellence, Bosch Solar, BP Solar, Siemens Solar, Swissolar, ECOtality, SunEdison, Sharp, Mark Group, Abengoa, Pescanova, Solexel AKA Beamreach.

They’re all in the financial scrap heap or so burned by the adventure they’ll never go anywhere near solar again. A rough estimate of that amount of capital destruction circa 2013 comes in at around 25 billion Euros, but hey, who’s counting after you get a few clicks north of a number like that?

That’s just the corporate side, but Joe “the innocent” Fleeceable got his poor whore’s ruff torn as well. All those panels installed for a song on your roof won’t last the promised 30 years, maybe 10 if you’re lucky. They’ll fall apart. Those juicy feed in Tariffs you were buying into have all been cut back, but what you’ve actually bought yourself into is a biohazard placed directly on the roof of your habitat that will gradually powder a variety of toxic particulates down onto you as the panels crack.

You were had.

Attempting to adopt an expensive chimera such as solar power has to be paid for by somebody, and that somebody is the ordinary consumer and it’s done by loading down their power bill with stealth levies until the point is reached where not only have their bills doubled, but they no longer can afford to heat all of a house through a winter.

It’s always the poor and elderly who’re hardest hit by trying to save the planet, although invariably there’s some sort of token concession held out to them, if only they could pick their way through a bureaucratic maze of Kafkaesque regulations that would baffle the mind of a budding Einstein, never mind someone who has a few reading problems with the daily pictorial.

It all gets a bit retro, Napoleonic even. People retire to what used to be termed winter quarters, get into bed with all their clothes on in a freezing house and try to stay there until spring peeks its cheeky face over the foot of the eiderdown in the dawning months of the new year. As usual, it’s the community volunteers who bridge the gap between noblest intentions and reality, or to put that another way, between the inhumanity of noblest intentions and the grubby reality of their manifestations.

I got the ones nobody else could get near, but eventually weaseled inside their defenses to get them out of bed, change the linen and introduce them to disposable diapers. It was always tactical stuff. Get some liquids down them, a regular infusion of some soup I’d bring along and listen to them bitching away about life, the universe, and such. I’d get a glance once in a while in mid bitch – they knew they were indulging themselves in reactionary old fart status but wanted to see how I was taking it. Boo-hoo, back to you and let’s just get on with it.

Putting a straw in a Styrofoam cup of soup and clasping your hands around theirs because they’ve got some shakes and are not so much afraid of spilling the soup, but of making a bloody fool of themselves by spilling it everywhere before a respectable gent like you. It’s unspoken, but you have to help each other through the bad patches.

I learnt to spot the proud ones who’d never leave their house for some fucking animal shelter pretending to be a care home, and when asked by some unter-unter-sturmbahnfuckwitfuhrer of the Social Services whether they should be for their own benefit be removed from their home, always answered no.

I’d long ago gone native because I like them saw who the real enemy was.

They knew what they were doing in choosing their own place of death in their home, and I knew that because at some point we would always come down to having that hard conversation in our friendship, since in the end they could see I was no damn bloody good but I’d never oblige.

People that brave in the face of the long marches of the night and such horrendous indignity in the daylight, widowed isolation, children abandonment and winter-long nagging suffering, have more than earned that human right, that final dignity to go out in the manner and place of their choosing, while cowards like myself could always contemplate slipping away because after a while we could no longer do that volunteer work.

It chews away at you steadily, until in the end you’ve got nothing left inside you but an anger and an abiding rage you can no longer conceal. That’s when you have to get the fuck out of there because you’re about to do more harm than good. Give it up, you’re the first wave up the heat or eat shore and you’ve now become combat ineffective, give it over to the next wave who’ll catch the falling baton and perhaps make a better job of it.

That’s why against my better judgement and despite a desire for a more peaceful life, I got sucked into the whole climate wars thing, and that’s why there was always a lot of passion in the writing. I’d wait until they were asleep and hold my hand to their cheek to check they were warm and alive. Stupido I know. Their skin always felt so tender, as soft and white as a baby’s.

Tuck them in carefully one more time and then slink out of their home like some low-born thief and back to my fully tooled up warm house alive with young vibrant life, a feisty wife and cantankerous family busy squabbling over what’s for dinner Mum?

And that’s the explanation if you ever wondered why, of the level of revulsion, disgust and hate I bring to the whole parasitic renewables scam and the whole collection of scum associated with it.

Nothing is free, there’s always a cost, and with renewables, it’s seen as a victimless crime even by climate skeptics, but it’s our most vulnerable who’re being spent every winter. Never mind the bloodless dollars and cents, it’s a human cost reckoned in a frozen pyre of needlessly lost lives.

If there’s no longer a need for somebody like me, an unprepared and veteran dad, dealing with the worst case of flesh dropping off nappy rash he’s ever seen in his life, and it’s all around the ass and vagina of a face down elderly lady of your mother’s age who trusts you, and you’re both working very hard to preserve just a little tweeny shred of dignity while you dab as gently as possible through the pain by telling her your tough guy stories you know she likes to hear, and she’s still game enough to tell you equally tough girly ones back through the hurt, then I’ll know the war is over.

Until then, ask me again in another five years how I feel about solar fucking power.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

The sun is setting on solar power, the money’s gone and nobody’s asking any questions.

Sleeping with the enemy.

There’s a killer in your house.

Climate Alarmism and The Prat Principle.

Click for a list of other articles.

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