Designing a better solar system

I just put a new metal roof on the barn. It occured to me that I could order it covered with a laminate that allows it to function as a photovoltaic collector and run my meter backward, I decided not to, because I couldn't afford either the time or the money to do it right.

Though I know I can't afford not to eventually, I don't believe its gonna be twenty years from now, when the warranty on the roof runs out, before my son inherits the energy problem.

What really bothers me is I know that if I let money influence my choices I have to expect others are likely to go the same route. I know that if I expect that what will make solar affordable and alternative energy feasible is more people using it, then I have some responsibility to walk the talk.

What follows is the illogic I was left with.

If more people use solar energy then it ceases to be a prototype and becomes somewhat similar to replacing your outhouse and dug well with indoor plumbing and your wood stove with steam or forced hot water for heat.

Fewer trips to the well to draw a bucket of water, fewer chores like feeding the chickens and weeding the garden and you can spend more time commuting to work in a car that burns gasoline.

The plumbers and the rest of their comrades in the industrial revolution were responsible for more than most people realize when they talk about Watergate.

Maybe its cause I'm moving and throwing out a lot of stuff so I don't have to carry it around with me, but it occurs to me that ownership, including technology with its patents and copyrights is expensive and though Republicans are all for an ownership society, doing it yourself and sharing technology has some merit.

For architects who can design things without reference to the plumbing fixtures on their plastic templates or blocks in their Autocad design centers, commiting to using solar energy is like making a commitment to handicapped access. back when architects were thinking about handicapped access, they knew that making it available everywhere was certainly going to be expensive. Despite that like special education not everyone needed it, we put it into the code and it got done as a health and safety issue.

Handicapped access is like public healthcare. Some people view Public healthcare, social security, medicare, medicaid, community health centers, neighborhood synergy, minimum wages, maximum wages, education, solar energy... as expensive entitlements and earmarks that reduce the funds we have available to build bigger and better drones. it may be the  drones artificial intelligence that allows them to bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb Iran, or it may be a programming issue, a garbage in garbage out sort of thing.

I can understand this "whats good for General Motors is good for the USA" point of view because I have been fortunate enough to have the media to read, watch and listen to all my life. Sometimes it seems like it would surely leave me with a bad taste in my mouth except for the sugar coating of sex and violence that makes me feel happy.

Pundits have explained that its all the fault of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and the Democrats. Whatever it is its their fault. Maybe in some ways it is. When we as a nation decided to let the Republicans cut and run from war on poverty and the war on drugs and decided the only things we had to worry about was more money and more status and when we let the gas prices of the Carter years fade into some parellel universe while we enjoyed the GIS capabilities of our SUV's I don't recall anybody leaving the dance floor to go sober up and worry about the consequences.

Toward the end of the last millenioum it was important not to be mislead that if you funded social services as entitlements eventually you got to a better quality of life, with people living longer better lives, doing more things they could be proud of, having legacies they could depend on. Don't worry be happy worked for a long time.

We could have been building a better future but somewhere there was a voice inside us warning that if we didn't eliminate all the competition someday there would be too many people doing too many things in too small a geographic area and you would have global warming and resource wars like this Iraq thing we have been forced into to protect our national security intrests and foreign oil reserves,

Higgins: It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?
Joe Turner: Ask them?
Higgins: Not now - then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!

Joe Turner: Boy, what is it with you people? You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?

A better quality of life where everyone didn't have to work for someone else for a living might not be conducive to a strong economy. A weak economy might mean there wouldn't be as much of a gap between the rich and the poor. If everyone were poor fewer children would be able to go to school and learn the pledge of alleigence.

If children had to stay home and help do chores, sharpen tools, cook, weave or sew, entertain themselves by learning to sing, dance or play music, there would be no Halo 3 for them, no cable TV with its pundits acting like big brothers to help make them well informed citizens. They wouldn't have celebrity role models, just whomever happened to be willing to feed them till they got old enough to go out and hunt and gather for themselves.

Maybe we need to consider along with the adoption of solar energy whether or not we are entitled to pass on to our chiildren as their legacy something more than that you have to work for a living and fight to survive, to have wars which make some people dead and other people rich because we let money influence our choices...

Money is like a whip or a gun, if you respond to its sanction then you are just another slave.

I don't want to see us a world of drones tasked with gathering resources to feed the queens brood, or acting as warriors to defend the hive by attacking everything that crosses the path of our army.

My barn that used to house horses that could plow the fields and drag stones over to their edges to build stone walls and cows that could save you a trip to the grocery store for a bottle of milk is full of old books that I don't read anymore because I can find it online faster, and computers that I don't use anymore because they don't have enough memory.

I don't know what the future is going to be like but I may come to find myself missing the long Maine winters and the cross country skiing.