Submitted by mafco t3_11m11re in Futurology
The following submission statement was provided by /u/mafco:
Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, a massive clean energy and electric vehicle bill passed by congress and signed into law last August, is much, much more than just a greenhouse gas emissions reduction policy.
The genius of the bill was incorporation of industrial policy to incentivize the growth of US domestic supply chains for everything from batteries to electric vehicles to solar panels. So far the response from industry has been almost breathtaking with a flurry of new factory announcements, tens of billions of dollars in new manufacturing investments and 100,000 new jobs so far. The ultimate goal is re-industrializion of the US economy and millions of new good paying middle class and whit collar jobs.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11m11re/reviewing_the_us_solar_panel_value_chain/jbf6ik0/
Although it may take a few years for the domestic manufacturing capacity for upstream components to pick up, it's still exciting to see the growth and progress in the industry
Does the solar industry have to plan on recycling all of these panels when they reach their shelf life or is this just capitalism as usual were they are going to churn out as much product without considering the environmental costs?
Yes. Panels are already being recycled. But with a 30-40 year+ lifetime we don't have to worry too much about that right now. It's just yet another right-wing anti-renewables talking point to muddy the waters and justify more obstruction of progress.
This is unfortunately one of those subjects where the right-wing talking points and the degrowth talking points are exactly the same. Some would rather the world burn than for technology to be the way we address climate problems but there still be capitalism.
Exponentials always beat polynomials.
Your premise that the technology solves it rather than delaying it by a couple of decades is faulty.
That said, the talking points are still wrong (except for the US industry which uses different materials and doesn't mandate recycling. It's comparatively tiny though, not even enough to meet a fraction of the local need).
> Exponentials always beat polynomials. >
Except much of what looks like an exponential is really an s-curve. We were never going to scale to infinite people, calories, land use, energy use, etc. We aren't going to build infinite solar panels.
And that panels are already recyclable isn't a "talking point," rather it's the state of reality. "But it's not mandated" just shifts the goalposts. And even if recycling was mandated, someone would say "but not all will be!" (which is true) and that will be the supposed "exponential" pointed to that will doom us all.
> Except much of what looks like an exponential is really an s-curve. We were never going to scale to infinite people, calories, land use, energy use, etc. We aren't going to build infinite solar panels.
Which is the degrowth premise... well done. You got there. Growth needs to end because it's physically impossible. And it needs to end soon because we're exactly where we were with the waste heat, land use and albedo decrease budget as we were with the CO2 budget when scientists started saying that maybe burning everything was a bad idea.
You've also switched back to talking about what sane countries do which is make and recycle monosilicon PV. The US industry is significant portion CdTe. You can't pretend that a monosilicon recycling industry is relevant.
> Which is the degrowth premise... well done. You got there.
Condescension is not fruitful here. Degrowth is not the mere recognition that we were never going to build infinite anything, or have infinite people. Not because we have to stop growth now, but because growth was never going to go to literal infinity. That's not a thing.
>Growth needs to end because it's physically impossible.
That's like saying we need to stop growing food now because it's physically impossible to have infinite food. That I shouldn't try to cure an illness or avoid death today, since it's impossible to live for infinite time. We should stop making light bulbs, because we can't have infinite light bulbs or infinite light. I can't believe people are so dumb as to think we can have infinity light bulbs! Except they don't, and it's a dumb argument. "We need to stop growing, because you can't grow to infinity" doesn't make any sense. The clause after the comma, after the "because," doesn't have any connection to the need to deliberately stop growth now.
Just like "you have to die eventually, so you should die today" doesn't make any sense. It's a given that humans will go extinct eventually, and the sun will stop shining eventually, and the earth will be sterile eventually.
Now you're trying to play semantic games by switching out the meaning of the word growth. Seems like the condescension was validated.
No, light bulbs are a decent proxy for economic output. Their purchase and use track with economic development, literacy (kids can study after the sun goes down), energy use, and population size. As does food production, scaling as it does with population, though it can be reduced per capita with technological improvements.
And yes, I have seen degrowthers lament declines in infant mortality, and agricultural improvements like the green revolution, precisely because they led to population increase.
More semantic games. Making a thing or agriculture isn't exponential growth. Neither is a bounded increase in consumption in only those places with poor quality of life. Straw men are also not relevant.
Have a read of your comments there and reflect on how disgusting and disingenuous they are.
I have read EPC and O&M contracts and EIA for my and rarely do I find decommissioning plan layed out in the states. Europe has much more firm grasp on tackling recycling than we Dos
solar panels have pretty damn long shelf lives. much higher than nearly all other electronic parts.
mafco OP t1_jbf6ik0 wrote
Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, a massive clean energy and electric vehicle bill passed by congress and signed into law last August, is much, much more than just a greenhouse gas emissions reduction policy.
The genius of the bill was incorporation of industrial policy to incentivize the growth of US domestic supply chains for everything from batteries to electric vehicles to solar panels. So far the response from industry has been almost breathtaking with a flurry of new factory announcements, tens of billions of dollars in new manufacturing investments and 100,000 new jobs so far. The ultimate goal is re-industrializion of the US economy and millions of new good paying middle class and whit collar jobs.