Environmentalist: solar power has failed

Bjorn Lomborg has written an absolutely devastating article about the failure of government subsidies to create solar power in Germany, from funding, to efficiency to cost to carbon emissions. Slate:

Germany’s experiment with subsidizing inefficient solar technology has failed. What governments should do instead is to focus first on increasing research and development to make green-energy technology cheaper and more competitive. Production should be ramped up later. 

In the meantime, Germans have paid about $130 billion for a climate-change policy that has no impact on global warming. They have subsidized Chinese jobs and other European countries’ reliance on dirty energy sources. And they have needlessly burdened their economy. As even many German officials would probably attest, governments elsewhere cannot afford to repeat the same mistake.