We do love people holding directly contradictory ideas
This is something we humans do rather well, hold two or more directly contradictory ideas at the same time. One particular version of this is prevalent over on the environmental left these days. Which is that renewable energy is just so cheap these days that they're going to take over the entire power sector, while at the very same time any cut in investment funds to designing new methods of renewables would be to condemn the planet, and Flipper and ourselves, to drowning in ever hotter water.
As an example, over at Salon they are running these two stories side by side:
We’ve seen prices for new solar farms below 3 cents per kilowatt hour (kwh) in other countries for over a year now, but before this week, not in the U.S. That changed on Monday when Tucson Electric Power (TEP), an Arizona utility company, announced that it had reached an agreement to buy solar power at the same game-changing price.
TEP says that this is a “historically low price” for a 100-megawatt system capable of powering 21,000 homes — and that the sub-3-cents price is “less than half as much as it agreed to pay under similar contracts in recent years.”
For context, the average U.S. residential price for electricity is nearly 13 centsper kwh, and the average commercial price is 10.5 cents.
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, criticized Trump for his proposed cuts in clean energy research. “His budget proposes a staggering seventy percent cut to renewables and energy efficiency initiatives,” Cantwell said in a Tuesday statement responding to the budget proposal. “This would devastate an emerging sector of our economy by killing thousands of clean-energy jobs all over the country — all in a misguided effort to hold onto the past at the expense of our future.”
But if solar is now one third the price of conventionally produced electricity then we don't need to be doing any more research, do we? We've done what we needed to do and we can stop now and go on to try and solve the next problem.
Alternatively, of course, there's something hooky with that 3 cents number and we do need to keep researching. But they can't both be accurate complaints. Either we've got cheap renewables and we don't need to research cheap renewables any more or they're not cheap and we must continue. But we simply cannot be where we've achieved our goal and we must still research how to achieve our goal.