human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
VIEWED: 60750
PAGE 96 of 111
Quote:
SIX:
One to three years to get the energy payback. A lifetime to get any financial payback. And you fucked up your roof with an expensive system that needs a lot of regular maintenance. Good luck in hail storms. You'll need it.
I would never advocate that YOU get solar. You don't get enough sunshine, your electricity rates are too low, and you're subject to damaging storms.
But I did my homework, pencil- whipped the numbers, and went solar. Why? Because I estimated our payback period - the time it takes to recoup the cost, after which it's all gravy - as 6.5 years. And since our rates went up about four years after install, the payback period got even shorter. Over the past 7 years since installation, we paid a grand total of about $1000 for electricity generation. $12 a month. I advocate solar to ALL my neighbors, and I'm no dummy.
AFA "expensive maintenance" .... that's the one thing in this older home that HASN'T cost us a crapton of $$$. I paid $150 for panel washing. And there's no roof damage.
You're just being a Karen now.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Just to make sure my point doesn't get lost.
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you'll never convince people that there's a problem if the "solutions" you advocate are too expensive for the average family, and always seem to mean the poor get poorer and the rich, richer.
If people see the wealthy sacrificing, they're more likely to credit the idea of climate change. But as long as they see "prescriptions" coming from on high, from conferences where the fabulously wealthy take their private jets, and tell everyone else how the vast majority must sacrifice... well, that's not gonna get very far.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
SIX:
One to three years to get the energy payback. A lifetime to get any financial payback. And you fucked up your roof with an expensive system that needs a lot of regular maintenance. Good luck in hail storms. You'll need it.
I would never advocate that YOU get solar. You don't get enough sunshine, your electricity rates are too low, and you're subject to damaging storms.
But I did my homework, pencil- whipped the numbers, and went solar. Why? Because I estimated our payback period - the time it takes to recoup the cost, after which it's all gravy - as 6.5 years. And since our rates went up about four years after install, the payback period got even shorter. Over the past 7 years since installation, we paid a grand total of about $1000 for electricity generation. $12 a month. I advocate solar to ALL my neighbors, and I'm no dummy.
AFA "expensive maintenance" .... that's the one thing in this older home that HASN'T cost us a crapton of $$$. I paid $150 for panel washing. And there's no roof damage.
You're just being a Karen now.
I'm not being a Karen. This house already has tons of problems I've had to deal with that most homeowners have never had to think about in their lives. The last thing I need is to make a bunch of holes to bolt a bunch of glass panels into my roof where we get hail at least 4 times per year. Sometimes the size of golf balls.
How much did your setup cost? How much do you figure you're saving every month?
--------------------------------------------------
Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
IIRC about $19,000. But since there was a $3,000 tax rebate, $16,000. Since our AVERAGE bill was about $190/month (and no, we aren't profligate energy- wasters. But we do have electric range and convection oven, which is what the house came with.) Since we had it sized to generate our average KWH, we're saving our entire electric bill. So our payback period was estimated to be $190/mo * 12 mo/yr * 7 years = $15,960.
Since then rates have gone up, so, in a sense, we're saving more $ than I originallyb estimated. And, yanno, we did all those energy saving things too, ahead of time. When our house needed a new roof, lo these many years ago, I picked a "cool roof" and made sure they put enuf insulation in the attic. When we had to replace the central A/C I got a zoned system with the best SEER availavle at the time. Over the years, we replaced our single pane, steel frame windows with high efficiency double pane. When it came to replacing our range I picked an induction range
Solar turned out to be the best home improvement I ever made.
Now, just to give you an idea where I personally draw the line ... I wasn't so interested in window replacement. It's a lot of $ for very little return. I would never, ever, spring $52,000 for a heat pump/ AC, which is recommended for our climate. But when it comes to re-roofing, I'd pick a cool roof all over again, since the extra cost is marginal but it saves $$.
It has to make household financial sense and have a reasonably short payback period.
*****
Before anyone thinks of solar, the first thing the solar engineers look at is your AVERAGE BILL. And before plunking $ down, people should check to see if doing something less expendive will save significant $.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
That's why I get irritated when the uber-elites, swanning around the world from conference to conference in their private jets, start making pronouncements that "we" need to sacrifice.
When I see those m-fuckers SERIOUSLY cut back on their privileged lifestyles, THEN I'll know they're serious about climate change/ poverty/ democracy, or whatever cause they're wringing their hands over.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Firemen put out fires. Even if you are poor. Now imagine if it was an optional service, where each person could decide not to pay. Poorer people decide that having fire department is too expensive for them so when their house burns, it burns to the ground because the poor didn't pay the subscription fire department.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you'll never convince people that there's a problem if the "solutions" you advocate are too expensive for the average family, and always seem to mean the poor get poorer and the rich, richer.
We going to have a whole world burning because almost everybody decided it was too expensive to have a fire department. Oh well. Too bad. But think of all the money saved, at least until the fire consumes your house with you burning inside, too! Most likely, you will deny that is a possible future so that you don't have to pay in all the years before the fire starts. And, Signym, you can virtuously complain about those greedy firemen being highly paid to do a job that you will never need because fire can't burn you since you are a special person.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
You make the stupidest analogies, SECOND. Is it really like that inside your head?
Imagine that you have a group of people who go around talking about fires, and then telling other people they have to pay the firestarters not to set fires.
That's not a firefighting service. It's not even fire insurance. It's a protection racket.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Climate change mitigation.
California may ultimately get more rainfall due to climate change, but climate change may cause infrequent but severe rainfall and melt the snowpack - long term water storage- earlier.
Hence, the mighty beaver!
SNIP!
Quote:
California to Reintroduce Beavers to Help Manage Water Resources.
"Beavers expand and even form a wealth of water-rich habitats including wetlands, riparian areas, and meadows. Their contributions to the natural world range from recharging groundwater and reconnecting streams with floodplains to providing fire breaks and refuges for species during drought"
https://mavensnotebook.com/2023/05/03/feature-california-taps-beavers-
to-restore-watersheds/
So, a creative low-cost action that both mitigates climate change effects (better long term water management) and helps prevent it (limiting the range of forest fires).
Also, a demonstration that biodiversity is like a game of Jenga ... start removing species and you may initiate changes, for good or ill.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
We need reality-based energy policy
By Matthew Yglesias | Dec 2, 2024
https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-need-reality-based-energy-policy
Climate issues have, to an extent, fallen out of the post-election discourse, probably because they didn’t play a large explicit role in the 2024 presidential campaign.
That’s fair enough. But they did play an extremely large role in Joe Biden’s presidency.
The Democratic Party trifecta of 2021-2022 put a lot of money into a lot of different things. But most of that was either deliberately structured as temporary pandemic relief or else written with built-in sunsets to reduce the cost (like the health insurance subsidies that are scheduled to expire next year) because it’s easier to extend a temporary program than to create one from scratch. But the easiest task of all is to avert the repeal of a permanent program, and the big thing that the trifecta made permanent was climate-related spending in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Which is just to say that climate was at the center of Democrats’ policy agenda, and it’s worth discussing both the decision to center it and also, given its centrality, whether the policy is being pursued in a reasonable way.
This receives less discussion than I think it deserves, because climate issues are less controversial among left-of-center intellectuals than things like trans rights or anti-Israel protests on campus. But way more people are directly, and tangibly impacted by energy policy than by Title IX rules governing school sports.
And I’m dwelling on the importance of this topic because while I think the adjustment Democrats need to make is relatively modest, I don’t want to suggest that the adjustment is unimportant. Small errors on a huge topic are a big deal, and even though the Biden-Harris administration mostly landed in a sensible place on this, they flirted with a lot of bad ideas along the way.
The guiding principle I included in my manifesto was, “Climate change — and pollution more broadly — is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey.”
This is to say, we should take environmental problems seriously. A real fact of the modern economy is that individuals and companies will, if we let them, generate more pollution than is socially desirable. This is bad. We need rules and policies to prevent it from happening. But we should prioritize anti-pollution measures that do, in fact, actually make people better off, rather than an arbitrary grab-bag of measures.
I found out last week that over on BlueSky (follow me!), I’m on a prominent blocklist for climate “deniers and trolls.”
I will cop to trolling on occasion. But this is not the first time I’ve been called a climate denier, so I really do want to say clearly:
• Carbon dioxide emissions are causing a wanning effect on our planet.
• The consequences of this are negative—to the extent possible, we should push for less climate change rather than more.
The only reason denialism ends up entering the picture is that a significant group of people have described climate change as posing an extinction-level threat to humanity or, at a minimum, likely causing the collapse of civilization. And these aren’t just fringe actors. In 2023, Joe Biden said, “I’ve seen firsthand what the reports made clear: the devastating toll of climate change and its existential threat to all of us. And it is the ultimate threat to humanity: climate change.”
This is not true, it’s pretty clearly not consistent with the Biden administration’s actual policies, and I don’t think Democrats should run around saying it.
Of course, the fact that something won’t result in the extinction of our species does not mean that it isn’t a serious problem. But the distinction here is important. If the planet were in the path of an asteroid that stood a large chance of wiping out civilization, you'd be willing to do crazy, extreme things — even if your actions got hundreds of millions of people killed — to stop it. If the asteroid were smaller and risked wiping out a whole ci
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Well, gee. Whooda thunk that if all of "your" plans to combat global warming involve making the poor poorer they would meet serious resistance? 
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME