Centralized corporate solar energy is green? not a chance!
Story on testimony by Frank de Rosa, First Solar executive. Arizona Daily Star.
This guy sounds just like an oil company executive with his complaints that they can’t just bulldoze wildlife and vegetation on our public lands. We need to kill this kind of solar energy for all the reasons in the article we posted the other day.
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Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University with specialties in natural resource politics, public opinion, interest groups, political parties, voting and elections. Aside from academic publications, he is author or co-author of three hiking/backpacking guides, and he is past President of the Western Watersheds Project.
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Corporations pursue whatever agenda they feel will be the most profitable. That’s one of the best, and worst things about them. The reality is that First Solar cares about the environment only to the extent that it effects their profit potential one way, or the other. Their primary responsibility is to the stakeholders.
Appropriate regulations that limit the ability of corporations to make money at the expense of ecosystems are so important because they act as a barrier to the “Just do it, then ask for forgiveness” approach that has been used so effectively in the past.
Daniel Berg,
That’s pretty much my objection to corporate power. Corporations should be tools for business continuity and raising capital. They should be a means not an end. As tools they are amoral, have absolutely no reason to consider the public interest. If they are multi-national, they have no reason to serve the national interest, any nation’s interest. They have no reason not to try to pass some of the operating costs onto others, including our common environment, e.g., pollution. They have no inherent reason to treat their workers well.
If the corporation has been captured by its Board of Directors, it many not even try to maximize profits for its shareholders.
The only entity strong enough to oppose and make them a useful tool rather than a dangerous one is a government. If they can destroy the governments, they will destroy the world.