Solar panels take energy to produce, transport, and install. Mining the lithium needed to produce them is pretty harmful to the environment. Other parts of the

Solar panels take energy to produce, transport, and install. Mining the lithium needed to produce them is pretty harmful to the environment. Other parts of the process are pretty bad too. If your efficiency is too low, if you install a gigawatt power plant and produce a half gallon of gasoline a month, you will take way too long to get an emissions ROI. Just recapturing CO2 requires less energy than recapturing and reconstituting it as gasoline. Sure you can sell the gasoline and maybe make some $$ but will that actually in the end be a net negative for the atmospheric CO2? The answer will 100% depend on efficiency.