ernop

But, why would god's magic automatically create a meal that looks like it came from real plants?

There are many connections in the way organisms work internally. Patterns of characteristics never overlap; you never get fish with wings because wings evolved after fish (if you get them, it's cause of convergent evolution), but you do get whales and snakes with atavistic legs, because those genes may still be hanging around their DNA. There are literally thousands and thousands of characteristics like this, that can all be sampled independently; using this sampling organisms can be put into clades (trees of descent).

These can be based on many, many characteristics of the species: appearance & physical features (shape of leg, skull, lungs, existence of various organs, etc), mutation rates of mitochondrial dna, their appearance and geographical extent from fossils. You can create clades of all major species based on any one of these, and the amazing thing is that ALL of them match up! So if god just created a random new animal, there would be thousands of variables he would have to take into account of to preserve this characteristic - not all of which we even know yet. (This property was noticed before we were able to detect most of the more sophisticated ways of measuring these differences, but it's always come true. And there could still be more out there - for example maybe you could use the dna of undiscovered internal bacteria of mammals to derive an evolutionary history, and it would have to match up).

So God would have to do tons of extra work to match all these up - and the questions then is, why would he match all the other stuff up too?

The really weird thing is that a normal, useful technology, which produces no bad externalities (no extra pollution, etc.) is being banned outright, rather than being taxed - instead of this why didn't they just slowly raise taxes on incandescent bulbs, to force people to notice? And instead of that, it'd be even better just to raise taxes on energy itself - that way people could choose where to cut energy costs, and not be forced to cut it specifically from the light bulb portion of their total energy cost.

Also, the fact that people haven't stopped using incandescent bulbs naturally just shows that electricity is still ridiculously cheap.

Do we have a lack of unused space, which isn't crossed every day by tons of heavy cars? If we're going to build these panels, there's no need to build them in distant places that often get damaged, like highways - better put them in unused land near a city to minimize power transportation costs.