Renewable Revolution

Agelbert NOTE: Below please find an "entertaining" discussion I had at Cleantechnica in regard to an article on an overpaid CEO of a Solar Power Advocacy Group trying to play the "corporate CEO cult of personality" BS game that got us to the biosphere destroying state we are in.


Denver
I think you mis-interpreted his salary. His actual paycheck was closer to $566,000. The remainder is mostly deferred pay, and the way IRS rules are set up, he may get or he may not. See rules on 457(f) SERPs.

While i realize near $600k is still lot, it’s not for trade group advocates and association CEOs, it’s pretty much inline. Perhaps you should look salaries of the people Resch is going up against at Edison Electric Institute, American Gas Association or American Petroleum Institute.

I want solar to succeed and I think we need strong, talented advocate at the head of SEIA. You may disagree that person should be Resch, but I have no problem with his salary.

agelbert Denver
Talent = Salary is what got the USA into the Greed is Good situation destroying the biosphere. You are so wrong to equate talent with salary. Talent goes with Vocation, not salary. Every spare nickel available needs to be put into the product or lobbying efforts, the way Elon Musk did and does. That's how it is done; not with the me first crap! Nobody needs that much money to live when they are supposedly fighting big oil and a polluted world future. If you claim he is "indispensable", I'll tell you what first year business administration texts say: "Find the indispensable man; and fire him!" I would fire that pig in a microsecond if I could. We do not need more "personality cult" greedball, ego trip, narcissistic, arrogant type CEO people in the Vocation of Renewable Energy, period.


Peter Quill agelbert
@agelbert: Seems like that online business degree  has prepared you well. Something they teach in actual business schools or economic courses is what's called "network effect." Resch and his staff's relationship with policy makers increases the probability of positive spillovers to the solar industry in the form of advantageous public policy. Advocacy is not like a business. Lobbyists don't go to work, turn on machines, and churn out public policy at the lowest marginal cost possible. It's about relationships with policy makers and their staff. In that regard, Resch is very valuable  to the solar industry. You can't simply substitute him out with a lower paid widget CEO and expect those countless hours of relationship nurturing  to transfer over.


agelbert Peter Quill
Yes, of course. You just gave me chapter and verse on "how the world really works". You brainiacs have done so well with that attitude straight from "Manufacturing consent ideology" haven't you? 

Damnant quodnon intelligent.

Civilitas successit barbarum.

"We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think – in fact they do so."
Bertrand Russell



Peter Quill agelbert
Throwing out incorrect applications of Chomsky, a few lines of Googled Latin, and a quote from a British philosopher is not a substitute for making a cognizant point. What's next, calling me a Nazi? Let's prove Godwin's Law correct.

agelbert Peter Quill
My, but you are good at attacking the messenger in hopes of undermining the message, aren't you?
Okay Peter, here's what I humbly believe you don't get. I will dispense with all sarcasm. This is serious and the pro-profit culture of the USA is destructive to the future of Homo sapiens, period.

That doesn't mean we can't make money off of Renewable Energy. Anyone with half a brain and some knowledge of cost accounting, that includes environmental bioremediation costs, understands that fossil fuels were never cheap and renewable energy is the default setting of everything that lives in the biosphere.

IOW, the issue is not which technology is more "competitive", "cost effective" or "convincing to the consumer and the government" through an intelligent and planned advocacy of Solar or whatever.

The Goal of Renewable Energy advocacy is Demand Destruction of Fossil Fuels. Why? because the profits from the sale of fossil fuels have been (and continue to be used for this heinous purpose to this day) used to buy the government and make laws that corner, stifle and strangle any technology that competes with fossil fuels for the last century or so.


People want Renewable Energy. All the polls confirm that. An advocacy has to go out there and get renewable energy in more and more hands, not try to influence the bought and paid for big wigs with bragged about "connections" like your hero. You need to shave $500,000 from his salary and write a check for $500 to a thousand people to be used on a small solar panel setup in their homes. They will then start scrimping to try to "get more our of the panel" and want to add more panels!  That is how you destroy demand for fossil fuels and beat them out of existence, period.

Here's a post I just made to illustrate what I hope china is doing and what I know we should be, but aren't, doing.

The rapid growth of the Chinese offshore wind power sector requires a rational and clear tariff structure, something the Chinese are serious and methodical about because they are clear eyed about what the future holds if they do not make sure ALL renewable energy technologies achieve the goal, and achieve it SOON, of total demand destruction for fossil fuels. That's what the USA can't seem to understand.

This is NOT about replacing an inferior technology for harvesting energy with a superior and cheaper technology; this is about Homo sapiens survival. The Chinese understand this. If only the USA did. We have, in the USA, the stupidest, most suicidal energy policy on the planet.

I hope the Chinese pull the plug on the building of coal power plants, decommission built ones and embrace Amory Lovins' accurate assessment of industrial civilization that with efficiency increases in the energy production technology from power source to consumer, over 90% of the wasted energy can be eliminated and we can power ALL the needs of present industrial civilization with only 10% of what we now use.

It's called negawatts and it is real. Why? Because a 5 to 10% efficiency increase (easily achievable with modern technology) in the transmission and/or generation of power has a multiplicative effect when it reaches the consumer. A 5% efficiency increase at the generation source equals over 70% energy saving at the consumer.

That is why the consumer savings, so far, have had such a small effect on fossil fuel demand. That has to change. Amory Lovins knows how to do that and has been doing it for several years.
I think China gets it. Our US (s)elected (by the fossil fuel oligarchy) "representatives" don't.
http://www.renewableenergyworl...

Give $500,000 to Amory Lovins and you will see real fossil fuel demand destruction.

Peter Quill agelbert
Making the point that we have a compromised political system that allows corporations to exert undue pressure on our policy making apparatus is a different point and one in which I agree. However, until that system is radically changed, it would be foolish for the solar industry not to play ball by those rules, however skewed they may be to incumbent industries.

You keep throwing out terms like "demand-destruction." There isn't "demand" for oil, coal or gas. There is demand for "power" and "energy" - i.e. what you can do with those resources. People largely don't think about or care how it is harnessed.     Oh sure, they might answer that they support renewables when called up by a pollster, but there is strong social incentive to do that.


What you are really saying, I think, is that the FULL marginal cost - the private cost plus social cost - needs to be included in the price of a unit of power. To that I totally agree.

I believe that a stiff carbon tax is the most efficient way to do this. It eliminates the economic inefficiencies that arise when you subsidize and regulate products and markets, and allows marginal users (i.e. a peak gas plant that runs 10 days a year) to continue running because economic surplus is created in that case, even after accounting for the social cost of carbon. So yea, let's tax carbon. Until we can get to that point, let's not sit on our hands and refuse to play ball in the current system just because we find it morally repugnant or because its not the most economically efficient way to achieve results. 


agelbert Peter Quill
I hear you and I understand you are trying to make the best of the hand you have been dealt, so to speak. I hope you are right and I am wrong.

I still believe the application of the negawatts course of action (to increase fossil fuel demand destruction in order to de-empower the fossil fuel industry from driving solar into a box canyon and proceeding to stifle it) is not optional because, after stifling solar through restrictive laws and such low down and dirty tactics, the fossil fuelers scream that solar is not cost effective and a "waste" to "subsidize". 

Then they crow about how "great" and "competitive" fossil fuels are. 


They did it to ethanol in the 1930s with Prohibition (and are trying to do it again now by backing the wrong crop - corn - as a biofuel source).

They game all these renewable energy technologies. Check out how Reagan turned the lights on Solar.

How Ronald Reagan turned the lights out on solar power

These people do not believe in a level energy sources playing field. Their version of a level energy playing field is an alpine slope with them looking down at you [/i]with lots of big rocks ready to toss at you if you get good at climbing that slope. If you play their game, you will lose.

If it weren't for the severe climate we are beginning to experience due to fossil fuel burning folly, solar would have been crushed just like wind, CSP and geothermal were in the 1980s.

We need the demand for fossil fuels rug pulled out from under the fossil fuel polluting, mendacious propaganda pushing pigs so they can no longer buy our politicians.


Peter, I see you are practical fellow. Well, the only practical approach to the fossil fuel pushing criminals is a paradigm shift. That's not about idealism; it's about survival.

Perhaps you do not believe the issue is that serious. I think it is. Taxing carbon is, of course, part of the solution to the overall equation.

But bear in mind that, historically, punitive measures have never worked on Big Oil and Coal because they buy the politicians. You must destroy their profits or they will destroy you (and, in the time tested path of the criminally insane, suicidally destroy our hope for a viable biosphere).