The news is out now about Elon Musks new Solar City / Tesla Project, please watch the video here:
Much like making electric cars more desirable and eventually cheaper, he is trying to make solar more desirable and eventually cheaper (once energy costs are factored in) compared to conventional roofs.
Notice the difference between Musk and all the others whose ONLY mode of operation seems to be ever increasing restrictions and telling people to conserve and stop using energy and stop driving and stop LIVING LIFE ?
He is working on technological solutions and using capitalism in a FAR more noble way where it’s not JUST in the service of profit for its own sake, but rather to achieve some societal good in reducing the costs of more beneficial and cleaner technologies. His method, will eventually convert people who don’t give a shit about global warming at all, because his solutions are better in so many OTHER ways that people care about. THIS is the path forward, this is the superior path that will lead to bigger results.
Now some will be FUMING at these words, retort that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, that we can advance technology AND force people and companies to reduce energy use or pay for some expensive retrofits to reduce pollution. That’s true. But honestly, the point here is that IF you are able to achieve a desirable result based on a win win scenario for all people, including their own financial win, that is a better solution than one that requires people to lose out financially for some societal good.
ALL of you authoritarian types need to look at your slates of solutions and ask yourself, is there a way to achieve similar results while having less of a negative financial impact on people, or by giving them other financial benefits not related to your pet project of the preservation of the current SACRED slice of climate. Because then, you will increase adoption, lower resistance, and everyone is both better off and happier getting there.
Learn from his example. Work to make the cleaner technology BETTER. And if you don’t know how, then patronize the companies that are trying, and vote for representatives that are supportive of grants to others that are trying to create the same.
While it’s tempting to believe that technological solutions alone can stop and reverse environmental degradation, it’s simply not true. Mathematically it doesn’t add up, not without some revolutionary new source of energy. Solar PV accounts for < 1% of US electricity production (cite: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)). Even if Musk’s invention is so successful that it quintuples US PV production, that’s still <5% of the grid mix.
The tiles mainly help the aesthetic concerns of solar (as related to homeowners’ associations, etc.) but doesn’t help alleviate the soft costs (permitting, installation, etc.) or the utility pushback (payback schemes are slowing down and going away).
But more than that, climate change isn’t necessarily a technological problem to begin with, but a political/economic one. If the US switched fossil fuels to nuclear plants, that’s 30% off GHG emissions curbed. Fund electric cars too and that’s another 26% of emissions stopped. (again from the EIA). If there were the political will behind this, we could make it happen in a decade and it would’ve cost less than half of the Iraqi-Afghani wars.
That still doesn’t solve the emissions from the industrial, agricultural, and residential sectors. There is a lot of EROEI (energy return on energy invested) research happening in those sectors, such as the potential to replace methane-intensive livestock operations with science burgers or home-scale smart appliances/cars/batteries and utility-scale smart grids for better load management.
Technological solutions are an essential part of any holistic environmental scheme, but at the end of the day, there will always be people and industries wanting to sacrifice sustainability for profit; in fact that is the standard M.O. of most companies today. Even the green tech companies themselves are not exempt from this.
The cobalt (among other things) used in Tesla’s Powerwalls and electric vehicles has great social costs:
Conflict minerals are a part of any microchip, and their costs are mostly invisible/externalized to US companies and consumers, to the point where they basically throw their hands up and surrender.
The regulations exist in help counter problems that slip through the cracks of the green-tech vanguard. As you said, they are not mutually exclusive, and are in fact inexplicably inter-tied. Just as the Clean Air Act spurred auto manufacturers to develop cleaner cars (and recent EPA mandates have again improved MPG), much of the current solar adoption is caused by government subsidies such as the Solar Federal Tax Credit or California incentives or legally mandated utility rebates.
In academia they talk about overall impact as “IPAT”, basically that the measure of a society’s impact is the product of its population, individual consumption, and the costs of production to facilitate that consumption. Improving the production by decreasing its environmental costs helps with one part of that equation, but not to the extent that it completely obviates all the other concerns. Put it this way: the average US person emits about 10x the pollution of the average person in India (one source). About 10% of our country’s electricity use is residential, so even if every single US household switched to these solar roof tiles, we would still be polluting 9x as much as the average Indian. Even if through some miracle of science we were able to switch all households, industries, transportation, and energy generation to cold fusion, we would still have an impact 2-4x that of less-developed countries.
What you’re proposing is not a new idea but is one of the most-studied parts of environmental science. Nobody is oblivious to the benefits of technology, and we are all hoping for rapid, sustained, affordable breakthroughs that can become part of an overall solution. But, doing the math, we realize that alone isn’t enough. Tesla didn’t make the first solar roof tile, and they didn’t make the first electric car, and even though they massively increased uptake, their overall contribution to the fight against pollution is more symbolic than measurable (thus far). And, again, we already possess much of the technology, just not the economic and political willpower to scale it up across nations and borders.