As I noted the other day, I’m skeptical about the future of a few industrial solar farms and electric cars powering out future in a few years. I think it’s going to take some big market changes and price rather government regulation and left-wing green shaming will slow the climate crisis down.

Everything fossil fuel related has to become much more expensive. It’s going to hurt the poor at first, there is no way around it. But higher prices are a powerful signal for market and personal action change. If the price for fossil based electricity shoots up, your home and business will have a very strong incentive to install lots of solar panels and battery storage so you can avoid buying as much power as possible from the fossil based grid.

Likewise motoring will only change when the price of gasoline shoots up, and your forced to drive less, get a small car, or go electric with your car. Obviously, if you don’t have a lot of solar on your roof and you don’t plan your day around sunny weather to charge your car, you can forget about motoring. Maybe consider walking or taking a bicycle to your destination?

A lot of people want a free lunch with renewable energy. But there is no free lunch when it comes to converting sunshine for our prolific modern use of energy. If we want to become a carbon neutral society we have to become much more dependent on natural rhythms of the earth and use a lot less energy overall.

We have to:

• Require buildings to produce and store most of their energy on site, relying on the grid only as a last resort
• Using the bulk of our energy on sunny days when cheap and plentiful solar energy exists in excess – including only charging electric cars at peak solar output
• Radically reduce electricity use especially at night and on cloudy days. We can store and move some power around but much less than we are used to with the fossil grid
• Make motoring so expensive that it’s only used for special purposes, instead relying on walking, bicycling and electrified public transportation for getting around cities
• Reduce heating and air conditioning in buildings, instead relying on windows that open, shade, dimmed lights to keep people cool in the summer and wearing warm clothes and blankets in the winter.
• Make conservation of energy a national obsession, forcing people to view all energy use as a waste and a burden to one’s own finances.