I'm not sure if you're asking actual or rhetorical questions. Assuming they're genuine: > Are you telling him that they are wasting half of the benefits they c

I'm not sure if you're asking actual or rhetorical questions. Assuming they're genuine: > Are you telling him that they are wasting half of the benefits they could get from the sun? They could have a nice warm planet AND drive around in electric cars all day? For free? Everything else would stay the same? Strictly speaking, yeah, they're not using all the energy they could. "Wasting" seems like a weird way to say it though, because it feels like that implies they want to be doing something with it. > If so, doesn't that make driving a car "free" in that it not even increased the amount of entropy? Since the sunlight would have turned into high entropy heat anyhow? On a long enough timescale nothing matters from the point of view of entropy. Net entropy will always increase. This is a pretty useless observation if you're trying to make a value judgement on the much smaller timescale of a civilization or the much smaller physical system of a planet, where having easily harnessable energy is important.