You're right that energy ultimately dissipates as heat, but the important thing is what the energy achieves in between hitting the earth as sunlight and then he

You're right that energy ultimately dissipates as heat, but the important thing is what the energy achieves in between hitting the earth as sunlight and then heading off into space as infrared. If you put a solar panel in place to turn the light into electricity and then use that electricity to write a Python plugin for Flake8 https://github.com/tlocke/flake8-alphabetize https://github.com/tlocke/flake8-alphabetize then maybe you've contributed something to the economy :-)