Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1minusp | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to believe this, but very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy.

View on HN

It's a complicated picture. Some Americans did not like the advice to "turn down the thermostat, and wear a sweater", and the next president removed the solar panels from the White House. It may be amusing to learn the country some of those panels ended up at, and the propaganda value in having such. Other Americans have improved water conservation ("Cadillac Desert" is a short and relevant read here) and those horrid land whales now leak far less oil; it used to be every parking spot had huge stains of oil beneath them. And the leaded gasoline, yum! Still other Americans howl about the toilets that use less water, and hoard inefficient light bulbs that do not last too long. So there are folks moving both towards and against reneable energy and conservation. Granted maybe there has not been as much movement as should have happened between now and when "The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here" (1973) got published, but that's not saying nothing has happened. Trends may help rule out some of the noise, or one might try to model things like the "Limits to Growth" study did, though other folks really did not like that report, and so these things go on and around.

I think a lot of people simply want to be contrarian to their perceived opponents: People in the other political clan like X so I have to hate X. No matter how much X might help them or how much better it is, they have to oppose it.

Economics will always win in the end. At the rate that costs are dropping for solar, it should just be a matter of time.

Biggest concerns are usually placement and durability to bad weather.

> Economics will always win in the end.

This may have been true in the past but the economics of today is "whether this is good for 1% of the population" and not in general, yes? If I can buy cheap solar panels from China (or say for the sake of argument someone "friendlier" like Germany) but that gets slapped with tariffs or other means the "administration" (bought by the 1% crowd) has at their disposal to prevent this from happening. If we lived in a free market this would be true for sure but we don't (by we I mean USA :) )

The remaining oil companies will profit tremendously from the high oil prices. I am sure they will have no problem allocating some of those extra profits to sabotage attempts to consider any alternative energy sources.

> Biggest concerns are usually placement and durability to bad weather.

And energy storage, and peaking, and matching demand to supply at the grid level. None of which are included in the usual "costs" of solar.

> very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy

A longer view of history shows a clear pattern: "After a gasoline price shock, households respond in the short run mostly by reducing travel, although estimates from the literature suggest the response in the short run is quite low (e.g., Hughes, Knittel, and Sperling 2006). Over long horizons, households adjust their vehicle technology and reduce further their consumption of gasoline.

...

The market share of full-size pickups, utility vehicles, and vans fell more than 15 percentage points between its peak in 2004 and early 2009. Small cars and the new cross-utility vehicle segment picked up most of this market share" [1].

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086%2F657541#...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com