And even Mother Jones finally understands why rooftop solar is a total scam

Barbara Streisand has them on her house, shouldn’t you? You CO2 – spewing pig, you.

D’oh.

The progressive magazine Mother Jones recognized problems with rooftop solar Monday, including financial benefits the industry gets from renewable energy credits (RECs) and how rooftop solar doesn’t help slow global warming.

Mother Jones argues credits and subsidies ensure rooftop solar companies aren’t actually helping fight global warming and instead are just enriching themselves while distracting from real solutions to global warming. The magazine claims RECs ensure someone who buys a rooftop solar panel isn’t actually fighting global warming, they’re “just helping the utility meet a goal it was already mandated to meet—thus helping excuse it from building more solar capacity itself. In other words, your direct net contribution to reducing greenhouse gas pollution is nil.”

Presently, utility companies are forced by law to purchase rooftop solar power at two to three times the rate it would cost to buy electricity from an industrial solar farm.

“[C]ompanies like SolarCity can sell them and thus help justify giving you the solar panels for little to nothing,” reads the article. “The biggest buyers of RECs are power companies looking to satisfy state-mandated clean-energy requirements, known as renewable portfolio standards. In effect, the power company pays for the right to claim the [lucrative] climate benefits of the panels on your roof.”

A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that rooftop solar subsides are inefficient and costly. Industrial scale solar power is more economically efficient than rooftop solar, according to a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Solar and wind power have been heavily subsidized since at least the 1970s. Federal subsidies for solar are about $5 billion annually, with more than half of that amount going to rooftop solar.

Despite these huge subsidies, in 2014 solar power accounted for only 0.4 percent of electricity generated in the United States, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Homeowners who lock themselves and buyers into 20-year leases of these rapidly obsoleting devices are also being suckered, but that’s another issue.

 

I finally understand why people found “Hogan’s Heroes” to be so horribly offensive

Good ol’ Sergeant Shultz, with his “I see nothing, I know nothing” was, it seems echoing German war criminals “to humorous effect”. Of course, that was a parody of the entire German population’s defense to the Holocaust, but to this 10-year-old, it just seemed a funny line.

Not so funny to Jewish survivors of the Germans and, reading just now of an SS killer named Hubert Zefke, I see why: He’s using the same defense.

While Zafke allegedly worked as a medic, prosecutors said, his real role had little to do with caring for sick or wounded inmates.

Instead, his unit was responsible for maintaining and administering the poison gas that murdered prisoners, prosecutors said.

Defense lawyers have argued he had no direct role in the genocide.

Zafke himself doesn’t deny serving at Auschwitz but has said: “I heard nothing, saw nothing, killed no one.”

It’s a pity he was able to hide out in East Germany for so long (where he sold pesticide, ironically enough) but if his last years can be made miserable, that’s some consolation.

Sgt.Zefke

MLS is closed today, but this one snuck in at Friday’s closing bell

8 Willow Road

8 Willow Road, Riverside, reports a contingent contract. Started at $4.095 million a year ago, last asking price was $3.595. Not at all sure I like what they did to the back of the house, but they did it, and someone’s okay with it.

I didn’t watch the debate last night, but Jim Treacher did, and he grabbed a photo

The debate ended early, after both participants declared that they’d stayed up way past their bedtimes