Or maybe the entire premise that there is millions of tons of plastic in the ocean was bullsh*t fearmongering.

Show us ALL the data and ALL the methodology.

And so was George Carlin when he said "You nail two piece of wood together that have never been nailed together before and some schmuck will buy it from you."
Green energy is on a lot of people's minds in far more a religious way than a practical one. A lot of people believe in global warming...I mean global climate change...I mean global climate disruption so much that they will buy anything to satisfy their need to continue believing it in the same way that people keep buying the latest fads in diet and exercise products. I'll make a prediction: in about 4 years, solar power will fade away once the subsidies disappear and people find out that it's really not cost effective if they have to pay for the whole thing.

That's a nice write-up. I tend to question the long-term outcomes of things that have no track record to back them up. What happens if the subsidies get reduced or eliminated by future Congresses?

I wouldn't even consider leasing them because if it benefited the customer, the solar companies wouldn't do it.
So with an outright purchase, the ROI doesn't seem to be there.

I've played around with a few ROI calculators and thus far it appears that I wouldn't break even for 17 years. That's a pretty lousy return on investment particularly if the cells only have a 20 year life. And the performance degrades over time. These calculators don't seem to take that into account.

One day, I decided to go program in the great outdoors so I drove up to the cliffs of Palos Verdes, CA overlooking the ocean. That day I was working on a tool for simulating flocking behavior. As I was testing it out, bees decided to swarm. :-O It was a Matrix-like moment several years before The Matrix came out.

Will these puppies also have some form of GPS in them? Not only will they know what filth you are posting but they'll know where you posted it from.

This will not end well for this company once Verizon and AT&T get in on the act.

Sorry, but policy has much more to do with it. The prevention of regular logging operations due to bogus environmentalist claims has a great deal to do with it. National forests that currently have 250 trees per acre used to have around 50 per acre only a few decades ago which keeps fire from spreading and the forest healthier. There are those who think we shouldn't remove dead trees because the birds won't be able to eat the bark beetles (Yes, this B.S. was on NPR). The only problem with that theory is that the bark beetles don't inhabit dead trees. They inhabit live ones until they kill the tree and leave the tree when it dies. As a matter of interest, the Wallow Fire in Arizona wiped out 841 square miles. That will take generations before it returns to a healthy state. That fire also wiped out the bulk of the spotted owl population. The anti-loggers end up torching that which they are trying to save.

Progress in battery tech is so far behind the rest of technology. You really need a battery that exceeds that of gasoline in terms of energy density. Then you need one that can go from empty to fully charged in 5 minutes without needing exotic infrastructure to do so. It needs to have a really low self-discharge rate, again, exceeding the decay rate of gasoline. And it's got to survive a few thousand charge-discharge cycles.

When I was in college, the dorm I lived in (co-ed by floor) has a 8 to 1 female to male ratio. I used to say that some asswipe dude had 16 of them.

Need I say more?

A) You should because it's indicative of the human behavior of successful people throwing road blocks in the path of anyone trying to do the same.
B) Irrelevant to my point. He's already made his pile so he doesn't care if it costs him more. People trying to break into the business without the benefit of a large fortune to draw from are now less able to do so. Some won't even bother which works to his advantage because somebody will drill for it.
C) You're assuming that the higher tax rate prior to 1995 was the sole inhibitor to success. Government regulations in the 60s and 70s were few and far between by comparison and the EPA hadn't really gotten going in the 80s so the guy had a much easier time of it early on.
A guy like this can afford an army of lobbyists to encourage regulation and taxation be written to either favor him or to hinder others.

And what are they going to do with the tax money anyway? Do you really think it's going to go to better schools? That's what they said about tobacco money. Didn't work out too well. And then there's the unintended consequence of feeding more government with the drug of more tax money which will become very difficult to eliminate down the road. "*GASP* WE CAN'T LOWER THOSE TAXES BECAUSE OUR KIDS WON'T BE ABLE TO GO TO SCHOOL!! OMFG!!!!! HOW CAN YOU THINK THAT YOU CHEAP BASTARD!!! Oh, btw, vote for me because I'll make sure the money keeps flowing."