On Fri, 4 Jun 2021 10:47:24 -0700 (PDT), "
wrote:

On Thursday, June 3, 2021 at 7:19:28 PM UTC-5, John B. wrote:
On Thu, 3 Jun 2021 15:51:28 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 6/3/2021 11:22 AM, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Thursday, June 3, 2021 at 8:03:51 AM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 6/2/2021 8:05 PM, John B. wrote:
On Wed, 2 Jun 2021 18:25:00 -0400, Frank Krygowski wrote:


One acquaintance of mine has an all-electric car and a very large solar
array on his house. His system is set up to first recharge the car. When
the car is topped up, the system sends electricity back to the power
company, reducing his bill. He's very happy with it.

Out of curiosity has your acquaintance ever calculated the pay back on
the system?
Not as far as I know, and I doubt the payback matters to him. He's
extremely committed to environmental issues. For him, his system is just
The Right Thing To Do.

What is the environmental damage from the construction and then destruction of solar panel arrays? This is not a minor problem. Do you have any idea of the maintenance problem of large dams? ...

Not to mention the environmental damage from mining and burning coal,
drilling for oil, converting huge portions of our corn crop into fuel...

Errr... I believe that the corn turned into fuel is grown in addition
to the normal crop grown for food. In fact I remember the loud shouts
of joy when the farmers found that they could get paid for growing
even more corn to be turn into alchol:-)

Yes. But the over production of corn for fuel leads to lower prices for corn, which might, likely does decrease the net income of said farmers. They are too successful at producing grains that are not really needed. Then the US government has to make higher crop subsidy payments instead of putting the money to pay off the debt. Or offer health insurance to those with none. Or some other wasteful thing. Like new military jet planes. Trump gave many billions of dollars to farmers to buy votes and subsidize them. And growing more corn than we need also introduces more chemicals and fertilizers into the soil which poisons our water. Too much poison in the water is harder to deal with than too little poison.

Have a look at
https://www.macrotrends.net/2532/cor...cal-chart-data
which shows corn prices over the past 60 years and the level seems to
have risen some 560% during that period.

--
Cheers,

John B.