On St. Patrick’s Day I went with my father to have dinner. We saw one of my father's friends at the restaurant and one of the topics we had was about climate change. He was saying that electric cars are worse than gas cars, and that we can’t fix climate change so we might as well just give up (I’m paraphrasing). I was shocked! Why give up? That to me is cowardice. What are we supposed to do, give up and not even try? Tell our kids, grand kids and great grandkids “sorry we fucked things up, tough luck for you?” Or should we try and heal this planet?
Say there is a slim chance that we can fix things, slim and trying is better than just giving up. We could do better. If solar was cheap enough (and if there weren’t companies out there that lie to get people to get it) more people would have it. If power walls were cheap enough more people would have those. The more people that have solar and a battery back-up for energy the better for the planet but the power companies don’t want this because it’ll mean less money in their pockets. If this were to happen though it would be better than nothing until other technologies are developed. Maybe hydrogen power in the home? Or something else.
The interesting thing about solar and Powerwall together is that you fill up the batteries with power during the day via solar and then you use the power from the batteries at night. If there is any leftover you can sell it to power companies for the grid so they don’t have to make as much power.
We could move to Mars in time, but then we’re just going to do the same thing there and the same thing to the next planet and the next one unless we learn our lesson. If history shows us one thing, we’re really bad at learning lessons, either by mistakes we made or other mistakes (unless the learned lesson makes companies money that is). That’s the thing though, now that we know Mars and other planets are possible, the wealthy can move and the poor will be stuck on a wasted planet that they didn’t think was worth even trying to fix.
