Climate Change? Nahhh ...

So let's state the obvious. The productivity boost that a tractor gave people over a plow horse actually made it cheaper to own a tractor. You dould do your work a fraction of the time, allowing you to have X more fields to grow stuff or to use the freed-up time to take on another income-producing endeavor. Tractors increased people's standards of living.

People willingly bought tractors and got rid of plow horses -- they made the choice for themselves -- because the decision brought them a ton of utility. Their lives were easier and better for it.

None of that has anything to do with a convseration about solar shingles.

 

People aren't. Even with our government currently coercing people not involved in the decision and purchase to bear part of the cost.

If there is a reason why it makes sense for most people, I personally am not seeing it. The only reason to buy and install those things that I can see is a belief that there is some environmental benefit that nobody can really quantify with any degree of precision, which will benefit the world in the future. That belief certainly does bring utility to some people (for example, around 1 percent of Americans drive electric vehicles currently, despite being able to have bought something comparable with an internal combustion engine for less money). But those people are a small fringe. And even if there are others who would really like to buy them, all things being equal, economically there are way more people struggling just to maintain a home that they can barely afford, let alone pay up for a roof and energy source that they don't find additive to their life.

If these are purely economic decisions. ... the energy needs of people are met much more cheaply and more reliably by a power plant fueled by natural gas than they are currently by any existing technlogy (other than perhaps nuclear, which gets rejected by a lot of other people as environmentally unsafe) that doesn't emit carbons . If those people look at putting solar panels on their home (as an example), the proposition is very high up front costs and a very long payback period. Which is why the vast majority of people don't willingly make that choice. It is nothing like the added expense of a tractor versus a plow horse, because the solar panels don't provide a kind of electricity that somehow makes those people more productive or boosts their standard of living.

 

I posted this the other day on a pizza thread on Anything Goes.



I wanted to assure people that it wasn't me. I also said I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when someone asked him, "So what are you in for?"