By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent What Happened:Varun Sivaram, the Philip D. Reed Fellow for Science and Technology for the Council on Foreign Relations, builds several admirable straw men to flog, including these nuggets of what apparently passes for wisdom at The Brookings Institute and The Washington Post:

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent What Happened:Varun Sivaram, the Philip D. Reed Fellow for Science and Technology for the Council on Foreign Relations, builds several admirable straw men to flog, including these nuggets of what apparently passes for wisdom at The Brookings Institute and The Washington Post:

• Solar advocates are bad because they don't advocate for nuclear energy and carbon capture (nope, I got nothing).
• Solar advocates only want deployment, not research into new technologies (perovskite researchers, you might want to give Varun a call).
• Solar advocates have argued for tariffs, raising costs and stifling inovation (to paraphrase comedian Lewis Black, "What advocates, where?").

SolarWakeup’s View:  So much straw, so little burn time. I'm not sure what Varun Sivaram has accomplished in his young career to have landed a prestigious position at Brookings and real-estate in The Washington Post, but if I had to guess I'd say is it's his willingness to construct straw men in an effort to offer an "opposing" viewpoint. In this case, Sivaram has decided to take solar advocates to task for:

• not advocating for nuclear energy and carbon capture.
• only wanting deployment, not research into new technologies
• promoting protectionism.

Both articles are linked below, and I want you to read both. Yes, Varun is tilting in both pieces at fake arguments that have never been argued by solar advocates anywhere, but there are subtle differences . In Brookings, Varun assumes the general ignorance about solar energy of the Brookings audience will be much deeper than that of his WaPo audience, so he switches from broad-based generalizations in Brookings to adding subtle details (INDIA IS IMPOSING TARIFFS, THEREFORE ALL SOLAR ADVOCATES WANT TARIFFS!) to gloss over his specious arguments in the Post. There's so much going on here I'm considering writing three separate articles taking on each of his straw men individually (please click on the poll below to let me know if you want to see it), but in a nutshell, here are my responses: 1) No one in solar is going to advocate for nuclear power because, while it is carbon-neutral, it is not "clean," nor is it renewable. Once the fuel rods are spent, you have to store them somewhere. It's not a clean resource. There's also the issue of how long it takes to build them and the stranded costs associated with them which, as I can attest (I'm still paying for First Energy's Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant here in Ohio) are passed on to ratepayers. Solar advocates don't argue for nuclear power because it's an inherently stupid idea to build expensive plants to transition to solar power, whose own technological advances are likely to make a transition fuel unnecessary. Which leads me to: 2) No one in the solar industry has ever suggested we should focus only on deployment and not on research. Did Varun not read any of the pieces written by solar advocates during the past two years of budget battles with the Trump Administration? 3) No one of any repute has argued for protectionism. As I've argued ad nauseum, the only people who wanted tariffs in the United States were two foreign-owned companies interested in protecting their own profits (and their often unwitting fellow travelers). As for India, that's a slightly separate issue, but I don't remember anyone in India arguing for solar tariffs until one of the aforementioned foreign-owned companies launched a trade complaint in 2011/2012. So it's hard to argue it was unprovoked. This is the kind of ridiculous piece you get when you're just looking for clicks and not argument. Shame on Varun, and shame on his enablers in the mainstream media and academia. More: The dark side of solar: How the rising solar industry empowers political interests that could impede a clean energy transition (The Brookings Institute) Solar energy is at risk (The Washington Post) - For the record, this headline is almost as dumb as the article.