'Unstoppable force' of solar power propels world to 40% clean electricity

This is a silly rant.

Politicians were also responsible for initially subsidizing solar to usher in the current boom.

Corporations invested heavily in solar production to create the cheap panels that are being installed rapidly.

Just because some politicians and corporations do things we don’t like doesn’t make them in general “the biggest enemy of humanity.”

They didn't need to subsidize solar. Just stop fossil fuel subsidies, which are $7 trillion/year and level the playing field.

That number is fake. There's no way to add up to anything within two orders of magnitude without adding extremely specious externalities and permitting rights.

Yes, 10 million deaths per year from air pollution are extremely specious.

OK, so what you really mean by "remove the subsidy" is "tax oil companies seven trillion dollars a year"? That may be a challenge for an industry that sold $2 trillion in the US last year, but if we're making up numbers, it'll work out.

But the larger issue is that this is driven by international emissions, so whatever the US does is essentially irrelevant to that outcome.

Even better news! If the subsidies are actually really small or nonexistent, it should be much easier to get rid of them, right?

Uh... sure? Can you point to the actual subsidies you want to remove?

I feel like you think you're making some clever gotcha, but what you're saying is, let's continue doing what we're doing right now.

The biggest ones by far is the lack of a carbon tax and, as a sibling comment notes, not having to pay for the health effects of their product. If you factor in the likely costs of climate-induced deaths, the total costs will be almost certainly be more than the total value of all fossil fuels ever extracted. The lack of these costs is therefore the ultimate subsidy in that the entire global industry, and in a sense all human civilization as currently constituted, is premised on keeping these costs unaccounted for. Presumably this is the kind of thing you mean by "specious" though.

Still there are lots of carve outs for the way extraction equipment and other capital costs are accounted for in tax law that are effectively direct subsidies to the oil industry. These won't end the practice of fossil energy use like ending the big ones would, but any little bit helps. Would also be nice to stop leasing out government land to do this incredibly destructive thing with it -- at least make drillers own the land or lease it from a private owner.