I liked your essay and I thought you brought up some really good points about how electricity changes everything about how people live their lives. It reminded me of a visit "up river" to a tribe in Central America years ago.
Some missionary group had set up a small solar system since the last time I had been there. Enough to provide power for a small refrigerator, some lights, and a television. The transformation of "after dark" life was striking.
Your observation about the "temporariness" of home solar installations was also extremely on point. This generation of pv cells has an ESTIMATED 20 year life span. Have you EVER owned anything for 20 years that didn't break at least once?
Even if it doesn't break, after 20 years ALL of these cells will have to be replaced. Across the ENTIRE planet. There is NO WAY we can produce solar on the scale necessary to power our world and yet ALL we hear is that "Renewables are the Solution".
In Diamonds book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive" he has a chapter on the Norse colony in Greenland that failed. Diamond describes is how climate change made the agricultural system that the Norse had carried with them from Europe progressively more impossible to sustain.
Year after year, every winter there was less food to go around and the population got smaller and smaller as people died from the effects of malnutrition and starvation.
Until the last desperate survivors probably built a boat, out of wood salvaged from abandoned houses, and tried to sail back to Europe. A trip they never completed.
What makes Diamond’s recounting of this story so compelling is that he shows these people didn’t have to die. The Greenland colony didn’t have to fail.
What everyone focuses on is how the changing climate made the Norse way of life progressively more impossible to continue. Until everyone starved to death and died. We tend to see this as a "tragic" battle of people against a tide they could not stem.
Diamond points out that they were not the only people in Greenland at the time and, that the “other people”, the Inuit, did just fine in the cooling climate.
What killed the Norse wasn’t the changing climate, it was their unwillingness to change and adapt to it. They were willing to literally die, before they would give up their European way of life and adopt the lifestyle of the indigenous people who they seem to have despised.
We don't need "renewables", in a vain attempt to cling to the 20th Century American "way of life". What we need is a vision of a "post industrial" way of life that doesn't suck.
The majority of Americans seem unwilling to entertain even modest changes in their lifestyle in order to slow the progression of the climate disaster about to engulf the world. Major social change is almost impossible.
Right on my friend. All of it. In my community in Oregon we have rules against lights at night. We love the night sky and it is still pretty great. And I agree . . . collapse is the best option, the sooner the better. That's a very hard one to say considering I have grand kids but for the long term health of wild nature, it makes the most sense.
I'm fully with you on the street lights, I mean I'm in agreement with everything here but especially the thing about street lights. It seems lighting means security and therefore extreme lighting is even more secure. Apartment blocks are the worst. Oh and now most Christmas lights are white so simply add to light pollution.
It's also sad to see how much Thailand wants to mimic the West. Everyone I know who has been to Thailand has something to say about how beautiful it is. While globalization makes the world easy to visit I fear it's also taking away the uniqueness of other cultures that make them worth visting in the first place.
I liked your essay and I thought you brought up some really good points about how electricity changes everything about how people live their lives. It reminded me of a visit "up river" to a tribe in Central America years ago.
Some missionary group had set up a small solar system since the last time I had been there. Enough to provide power for a small refrigerator, some lights, and a television. The transformation of "after dark" life was striking.
Your observation about the "temporariness" of home solar installations was also extremely on point. This generation of pv cells has an ESTIMATED 20 year life span. Have you EVER owned anything for 20 years that didn't break at least once?
Even if it doesn't break, after 20 years ALL of these cells will have to be replaced. Across the ENTIRE planet. There is NO WAY we can produce solar on the scale necessary to power our world and yet ALL we hear is that "Renewables are the Solution".
In Diamonds book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive" he has a chapter on the Norse colony in Greenland that failed. Diamond describes is how climate change made the agricultural system that the Norse had carried with them from Europe progressively more impossible to sustain.
Year after year, every winter there was less food to go around and the population got smaller and smaller as people died from the effects of malnutrition and starvation.
Until the last desperate survivors probably built a boat, out of wood salvaged from abandoned houses, and tried to sail back to Europe. A trip they never completed.
What makes Diamond’s recounting of this story so compelling is that he shows these people didn’t have to die. The Greenland colony didn’t have to fail.
What everyone focuses on is how the changing climate made the Norse way of life progressively more impossible to continue. Until everyone starved to death and died. We tend to see this as a "tragic" battle of people against a tide they could not stem.
Diamond points out that they were not the only people in Greenland at the time and, that the “other people”, the Inuit, did just fine in the cooling climate.
What killed the Norse wasn’t the changing climate, it was their unwillingness to change and adapt to it. They were willing to literally die, before they would give up their European way of life and adopt the lifestyle of the indigenous people who they seem to have despised.
We don't need "renewables", in a vain attempt to cling to the 20th Century American "way of life". What we need is a vision of a "post industrial" way of life that doesn't suck.
The majority of Americans seem unwilling to entertain even modest changes in their lifestyle in order to slow the progression of the climate disaster about to engulf the world. Major social change is almost impossible.
Right on my friend. All of it. In my community in Oregon we have rules against lights at night. We love the night sky and it is still pretty great. And I agree . . . collapse is the best option, the sooner the better. That's a very hard one to say considering I have grand kids but for the long term health of wild nature, it makes the most sense.
*The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light* by Paul Bogard is a great book on this subject.
Thanks for your writings, and for caring!
I'm fully with you on the street lights, I mean I'm in agreement with everything here but especially the thing about street lights. It seems lighting means security and therefore extreme lighting is even more secure. Apartment blocks are the worst. Oh and now most Christmas lights are white so simply add to light pollution.
It's also sad to see how much Thailand wants to mimic the West. Everyone I know who has been to Thailand has something to say about how beautiful it is. While globalization makes the world easy to visit I fear it's also taking away the uniqueness of other cultures that make them worth visting in the first place.
Interesting piece, thank you.