Pirate's Cove

Interestingly, nowhere in this Washington Post piece do the authors, Michael J. Coren and Niko Kommenda, mention themselves making any of these changes, nor that the Washington Post is doing this for their offices (non-paywalled here)

How fast do you have to buy EVs and heat pumps to avoid the worst effects of climate change?

Judging by the surging sales of green technology, U.S. households appear to be on the verge of a low-carbon future. Millions of Americans are buying electric vehicles, heat pumps and induction ranges.

But those numbers belie a starkly different present. Just about 3 percent of Americans, for example, reported owning an induction stove in 2022.

That’s close to the share of the U.S. population that owned a cellphone in the late 1980s, a few years after the first models came out. It took more than two decades for wireless technology to eclipse home landlines.

There are a whole bunch of whys for taking that long, such as cost and coverage, but, the most important thing is that Government wasn’t forcing people to get a mobile phone and get rid of their landline. And, why is this anyone’s business what kind of stove you have? Or car? Or heating/cooling system?

Time is tighter for the climate. To meet net-zero emissions targets, and avoid the worst effects of warming, most households will need to embrace a new suite of low-carbon technologies by 2050, says the electrification nonprofit Rewiring America.

To make it happen, they’re betting on the “S-curve.”

Virtually every major technology over the past two centuries has followed the same swooping S from virtual obscurity to near-ubiquitous adoption. Economists can now predict this basic shape with surprising accuracy, though the exact nature of the curve or slope change varies by product.

And almost none of the major technologies required governmental force to make citizen purchase and use. Your computers, 4K TVs, streaming devices, WiFi, seriously, all this stuff I’m looking at while sitting here typing was not forced by government. Heck, some things just work great. The design of my guitars and fishtank have barely changed in decades, because they’re fine.

How fast Americans reach that point with green technologies is up to early adopters, about 15 to 20 percent of the population. They set the stage for this exponential growth by trying products before others do.

Take the thousands of die-hards who leased the first modern electric car, the EV1, released by General Motors in 1996. It had a 74-mile range at a time when drivers had virtually nowhere to charge except their garage.

They purchased those because they wanted to. Not because they were made to. Right now, the majority getting EVs are getting them because they want to, and typically make between $150k-$300K. Those who aren’t switching might consider in the future, but, it needs to be their choice, not the government’s.

Americans are on track to meet those goals, but reaching higher levels of adoption will require overcoming barriers such as high costs and a limited number of available models.

Which is government force. Mandates. For EVs, heat pumps, home solar panels, stoves, and heat pump water heaters, all mentioned in the screed. The only way they get there is by government regulating away what people can purchase and use. All of which are much more expensive. One way to get people to do this is by making the established devices much more expensive. They changed the standards for AC systems this year, making them thousands more. Or, they just refuse to approve, or say no more natural gas stoves and heating systems and water heaters.

In the early 1980s, AT&T asked consultants from McKinsey to estimate how many wireless customers it might have at the turn of the century, according to a report in the Economist.

Their answer — 900,000 subscribers — turned out to be the number of new customers joining mobile phone services every three days by 2020.

No one made citizens get them. No one mandated that people could not have wireline phones at home or the office. Construction typically has landlines (it’s usually required by government in new construction. Also, landlines tend to be one of the last things that go down during storms. I have a cheapo in the bedroom. I have no service, but, it will work if I call 911). Government did not require people to give up their flip and candybar phones and get a smartphone. Private companies incentivized people to do that. Private companies moved from WAP (wireless access protocol) running at 14.4kbs to 5G. Private companies put up towers to provide coverage.

And these climate cultists are pushing people to do things they mostly aren’t doing themselves, all for an authoritarian scam.