To get off fossil fuels, America is going to need a lot more electricians

Which scenario is more profitable?

It’s one of the side effects of bad corporate leadership and layoff cycles — you can continually lay off your workers but the concequence is they will expect it and act accordingly.

We need better management culture. The downsides of the breakdown in employer / employee trust is profound and the impacts will be much longer lasting and deeper than people realize.

This scenario happened to my father-in-law. He spent the better part of a year training a guy for free (not sure if he paid the guy), expecting that he'd continue to work with him for the foreseeable future. Instead, the guy left immediately after he'd finish training and became a competitor in the same local market. It felt like the year of training had been utterly counterproductive for my father-in-law, economically speaking.

The longstanding expectation in the trades (at least in the US) is that training/apprenticeships ought to be free or even paid, even when it calls for a major time investment on the part of the instructor. Perhaps that practice needs an update.

Would be better if we allowed trade schools to issue licenses for particular types of work. As in someone can take a set of classes and get a license to install car chargers. Seriously you don't need 5 years of training to add a breaker to an existing panel and run romex to an outlet. Especially if a permit inspector checks the work.

You can run a trade school exactly how they run dental schools. Where the students after taking classes and labs then practice for real. No reason instruction couldn't include actual work in the field.

Note that if you put your charger on the same circuit as your dryer/water heater/etc, code will likely not allow you to have both plugged in at once even if you take care not to use both at the same time. Breakers are emergency protection, not the first line of defense. Add a "Dryer Buddy" or similar to the circuit.

I asked an electrician about this once and got lectured. Apparently per regulations a dryer needs to be on a dedicated circuit, and tapping into that line is a big no-no. Nor do you want to have to depend on a breaker as a fail-safe at this amount of current. Instead he ran a separate 50 amp line to my garage terminating in a single outlet, that I can do whatever I want with, EV or welder or whatever.

Mostly as heat-exchangers continue to get efficiency gains, electric car prices continue to plummet, and solar continues to become more effective watts/$. While not all of these options will work for everyone, they will work for _most_.

It doesn't make sense to spent billions of dollars securing oil when we can spend millions switching to electrical infrastructure.

This wouldn’t need much, and the handful of people who control America, a lot of them are making money from some of those four changes.

> Shit won’t hit the fan until everybody alive today is dead.

That’s radically not true: millions of people have died because of the consequence of global warming already, but I’ve learned the hard way not to debate with climate deniers.

The real incentive to get out now is to have people who suffer visibly and directly from the consequences of fossil fuel extraction: cancer alley in Louisiana; children who grew up next to highways and also have cancer; people poisoned by oil spills and pipeline leaks; people who lost their water table to fracking; those people have grounds to sue, a press that interested in covering their case. They will make exploiting oil more and more expensive. How much depends on lobbying–you are right about that. However, I suspect judges won’t all be compliant to suggestions that cancer patients are already dead, and asking businesses to pay their heirs real money isn’t ethical. The alternative will increasingly look like business as usual, and many more people will be sacrificed the same way. Each slap on the wrist will look increasingly appealable.

Those directly affected will soon be joined by people who had their livelihoods destroyed by global warming through forest fires, floods, and hurricanes to join them. Individually, I agree that’s not very influential, but one of two things might happen:

* Insurance companies are one of the really big players in this world. If they are forced to keep policies and pay, they might start some actual lobbying to prevent the worst. That means an all-out board-room war against fossil fuel. That sounds unlikely unless you count some big clients that can’t just ignore the problem, like Disney, or anyone with a big footprint in California, Florida, Louisiana, etc. That’s enough of the Fortune 500 to justify some coordination and to build an interest in not abandoning the coast to storms.

* More likely, insurance companies will drop many of their smaller clients. A large grassroots movement might grow — not of toothless people in caravans on tornado alley, but real-estate promoters who can’t insure and therefore can build, resell, and renovate their property. They could and already do catastrophe adaptation. It works now, but that math won’t last long: they’ll need hurricanes to slow down, flood, and heatwaves too. They’ll also rapidly find that companies like McDonald’s care about not having their restaurants blown away too—and they are around the globe.

What a horrible take.

I don't think that's true. People can have much higher than 0 interest in something, but still barely make any progress toward it at all. And with nations, there are always competing interests.

"Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights." -Ronnie Coleman

The shorter the training time, the faster we can react: two-year vocational training, mainly on the job, isn’t too bad. Still, it typically requires some light panic first and then a few articles about increasing demand and salaries for the offer to catch up.

My friend makes backflow valves in Arizona. They pay $110k+ for backflowvalve technicians, a certification that takes two weeks and $1,000 to get. They will pay for the certification. Technicians set their own schedules and typically work 25 hours a week. He struggles to find candidates who can pass a drug test, and is making do by paying those close to retiring bonuses to keep working.

Meanwhile, down the road, ASU prints communications majors who earn half that [1] at a cost of at least 16x more [2] and 100x longer. I doubt any of them could tell you what a backflow-valve technician does. (Were it not for my friend, I couldn’t either.)

There is a signalling problem between the trades and high-school graduates.

[1] https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/arizona/arizona-state...

[2] https://admission.asu.edu/cost-aid/resident-first-year assuming in-state tuition, financial aid, zero living expenses and ignoring opportunity cost

I have a 70-year old relative who was a lifelong electrician, and he basically can't move now without significant pain due to the lack of cartilage. Electrician work, especially in the home, involves a lot of awkward angles.

Sure, cars were cool, but nobody really felt like a Damocles sword was dangling above their head just because they were sticking with horses for a few more years. The car revolution was a lot more organic than what is now electrification

That’s the problem: it often doesn’t. I’d have an air-to-water heat pump heating my house today if the quotes I got were remotely cost-competitive with a replacement gas boiler. A payback of “never” or “not within the projected lifespan of the equipment”, coupled with far fewer people who can service the equipment and far less likelihood that any part you need will be right on the truck, means that a lot of houses, including my own, have a gas boiler installed and maybe will electrify in 20 years if it’s competitive then.

I’d have even paid a small premium ($3-6 thousand? Sure! But not well into five figures) to go air-to-water, but not 2-2.5x as much to buy into a possibly hard-to-service (due to lack of experienced techs with non-standard equipment, not because the equipment itself is a problem).

The UK is so far ahead of the US in air-to-water that it’s crazy to think we share a planet.

We put solar panels on our roof not because we love the environment or civilization or are worried about saving the planet but because it ultimately would save us money on utilities. For everyone else on our local electric monopoly who didn’t lock in rates with a buyback agreement, they are now paying more for electricity, installation of solar panels costs about the same, but their break even period is nearly twice as long. We are a lot less retro-fit solar installations now.

Would I like an electric car? Probably, but the economics don’t work for us. 15 years ago I estimated gas would need to be above $5/gallon for years to justify the cost of a hybrid, let alone a full EV. We got close to that in the last year, but now fuel is back around $3.50 and once again the economics don’t work.

When compact fluorescent came out, I bought them to reduce lighting costs by 50%, and then did the same with LEDs. I’ve replaced 1000W servers in my house with systems that can run in dozens of watts.

I can deal with a 3-10 year pay back on long term items (stove, heaters, etc.). Our electric company, however, cannot be trusted, so I do everything in my power to reduce what I use from them. Unfortunately (or fortunately), our NatGas provider has not screwed people over so thoroughly. I have no intention on replacing gas appliances only to be more beholden to the electric company.

Just depends on what kind of "solution" you allow for. Job shortages may be filled by illegal workers, unqualified workers, or workers cutting corners.

I think if we are looking to metaphors, it might be better to look at chemistry, where many reactions need catalysts to overcome the activation energy. As with many public goods/utilities, there may not be a viable profit incentive for providing or creating such a catalyst. I also see many other career paths have similar or worse problems (such as the pilot shortage).

Just had a gas cooktop replaced with induction, the whole switchboard had to be replaced and it was a big job. Guy didn't have training on installing a Tesla charger, so I guess he was busy enough as it was. He said people just love induction.

(Got my EV 1.5 years ago, I'm just using the mobile charger for now; works well enough at up to 9A/240v - but trying to line up an upgrade nonetheless, as I currently can't take advantage of peak PV on really sunny days. Garage shares a 15A with the drier etc.)

Do you mean electrical engineers? Even then, they'd only have a hard time finding jobs if they insisted on living in places where not much construction is going on.

States define the ratio of electricians to installers so with the right ratio and availability of work there are plenty of contactors who will hire electricians without expecting any work to be completed.