First the irony of you citing DR. Sowell's article as having no supporting facts or figures. This is an article, not one of his fine books that has all the data an intelligent person would need to analyze. Second, he did use a couple of examples to make his point. If the professor had told a Muslim to stomp on the name Muhammad in a class he probably would be either dead or disbarred within one day. But it's ok to stomp on Jesus? Most likely he wouldn't have the courage to stomp on Muhammed, Budda (they wouldn't fight back?), Mao, Che or any other darling of the left. I used to be a big leftie. I wrote my senior dissertation on global cooling. Kind of funny huh? I helped found one of the chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against...

I'm a certified energy auditor with over 30 years in contracting. I have yet to find a photo-voltaic installation with under a 30 year payback. Solar hot water may make a 15 or 20 year payback, but that is out the window with the cost of natural gas backup going down. There is only one product "Solarwall" out of Canada that has a legitamite payback of under 15 years. The application is often hard to find, but when it does it works great. Even then we can't always find the right application. We haven't really tapped the envergy conservation market. Most energy upgrades have 20 year or longer expected life and therefore can't be amortized very quickly. A real problem for commercial building owners.