Hah, no worries. I did figure if the discussion was going to move over here, it might be worth having the additional context, anyway.
If that big house is in Texas, you can add solar panels to make it energy self-sufficient and carbon neutral. The leftover energy can power your EV.
More directly, fuck you no, you canāt live in New York. Maybe someday weāll develop sustainable, carbon neutral ways to heat homes in the winter. But for now, living in cold places is killing us.
Long, rather exhaustive look at policies designed to mitigate climate change. (The article also discussed nuclear power, a rarity. The writer linked to a Dave Roberts piece from July, and itās not good news on that front.)
You do need to build those solar panels, so you still creating extra population and carbon in the atmosphere.
How is heating a house not better for the environment than trying to cool it? Solar panels do work in the winter time.
If you want to transition away from fossil fuels then you will need to build new infrastructure, from solar panels to new housing. Itās an inescapable one-off cost.
Heating a home when itās 10 F outside takes far more energy than cooling it when itās 90 F outside. And in most Northern areas, there isnāt simply enough sunlight in the winter to heat homes via solar. Think of it this way: if the sunlight falling on your house doesnāt deliver enough energy to keep snow off your roof, how do you expect it capture it and use it to heat your entire house?
Only if you want to live on the surface, like some sort of Eloi.
So a few points - Solar panels are slanted and can be directed in such a way to keep small of it. It wouldnāt take much to keep snow off, and keep them working efficient. Itās also not the only source of energy when it comes to heating a house. My own house has a fire pit which works quite well.
Also, heating isnāt universal. If you live in a cold climate, you know there are wonderful items, such as sweeter, pants, and even thermal underwear to keep you warm in even the coldest days. On a hot day, Iām forced to use air condition, because even walking around in just your underwear can be too hot.
But a cold day. A cold day is easy. Just wear layers. Anyone can do it.
But even then, with some good insulation, it doesnāt take a lot to heat up a room or a house and keep it warm through out the winter.
And again, I canāt stress this enough, solar panels are resource intense. In the long run, if you need energy, they make sense. But if you can cut down on your energy costs, that is best.
Living in a city, especially an apartment, in the north, you have an easy time of recapturing waste heat, and using it to heat the building. As long as you keep the building warm enough to the stop the pipes from bursting, you can wear layers, further reducing heating costs. In addition, with cities, you can have efficient public transportation instead of requiring a car (further saving, both in car use and car construction).
Face it, living in the south is only possible due to air condition, and itās only going to get worse.
I was born in the jungles of SE Asia. I grew up in the North Georgia pines. I lived for several years on the banks of the Big Muddy in Memphis. I spent a year in the Arizona desert. This past year was spent in Seattle, my first winter north of the Mason-Dixon Line. We just had close to a foot of snow dumped on us, the most Iāve ever seen at one time in my whole life. Still, adjusting to this cold weather has been a breeze.
I donāt miss southern weather at all. I donāt miss it being close to 90 out. In late April. So Iāll gladly take these cold rainy days now in exchange for this later:
(Sorry for the off topic post).
Thatās not what I meant. The total amount of energy that a solar panel can collect cannot be more than the total amount of energy that would have otherwise landed on or near the roof. Itās simple physics. You canāt create energy out of nothing.
And how much energy would have otherwise landed on or near the roof? Well if you see a snow covered area, you are basically looking at an area where there isnāt enough solar energy to melt snow.
If youāre going to burn something to keep warm, you might as well use natural gas. Your fire pit isnāt doing the climate any favors. A modern gas furnace is far more efficient.
No matter how many layers you wear, you need the air temperature to be at least 60 F. Itās actually illegal for landlords here to set the daytime temperature below 65 F. Because, you know, itās a health issue.
But even a brisk 60 F is going to take a lot of energy when itās 10 F outside. Certainly more energy than cooling your home from 90 F (which equally takes advantage of insulation and efficiency of scale).
You must realize that while heating is prehistoric, air conditioning is a recent invention. People lived in Texas long before the first A/C was installed. Plenty of hotter places in the world lack A/C even today.
So donāt tell me itās impossible to live in the South without it. If Chicagoans have to wear a parka indoors, Texans can use a paper fan.
You keep saying this, but NY has the second lowest per-capital energy use in the country. Texas is number 6. And there doesnāt seem to be much correlation here between climate and energy use. Indeed, among southern states, only Florida and Georgia are in the bottom half.
Edit: Now compare that ranking with this one of population density. Thereās a much stronger correlation between population density and energy use than there is between climate and energy use.
This argument is pretty obviously misapplied. It really depends on how the energy is being captured and used. I mean, if I pour a gallon of petrol over the the engine compartment of a car and light it on fire, that car isnāt going to move very far. If, however, I put it in the tank, and start the car, Iāll probably get 30 miles of movement out of it. Thatās not magic.
What happens with snow on your roof is that 90% of the sunlight is being reflected away by the high albedo of the snow. Sunlight basically never melts clean snow; snow is melted by the temperature of the surrounding air. This is not because solar energy is weak. Itās because it is the wrong application of energy to melt snow, so that 90% of the energy is wasted.
Itās enormously less energy-expensive to design and insulate homes in cold climates to reduce heating costs than it is to air condition homes in hot climates.
Those figures take into account agricultural/industrial as well as household usage. Texas has a far bigger agricultural sector than NY, which is very energy-intensive. New York relies mostly on its service sector, which is very energy-efficient compared to agriculture, manufacturing, etc.
My roof, like many others, is black. It absorbs most solar energy and converts it to heat. So how can snow even accumulate?
Look, thought experiment aside I hope you are not seriously suggesting that solar panels can actually heat a home in Chicago in the winter. There are various BTU calculators online that should quickly dispel that notion. When the outside temperature is 0F, a well insulated 100 square foot space requires 6500 BTU/hr, which is 1900 watts. You could fit at most six standard 17 sqft panels over that space, with a peak output of 1650 watts. If the peak output is insufficient to heat the space, you are definitely going to need to burn something at night.
Insulation equally improves the efficiency of cooling and heating.
Iām not sure if you are claiming that āinsulation is cheaper than air conditioningā, because obviously thatās true. Insulation is relatively cheap. The question is whether heating a well-insulated home in the Northern winter takes more energy than cooling a well-insulated Southern home in the summer. And yes, it does. A lot more.
This is the key bit that I think may not be apparent to folks who donāt live somewhere with really bad winters. I like things cool so I never turn my thermostat about 62 and usually itās at 60. Most people consider that uncomfortably cool. (Though itās worth noting that I know a handful of people who like it even colder.) But you canāt go much below 58 indoors regardless of how many sweaters you wear.
Once the temperature drops below 10 there are other factors that come into play like worrying about frozen or burst pipes. If you donāt keep your house adequately heated your pipes will freeze and if they freeze bad enough, they may burst. Burst pipes are bad.
This has been a relatively mild winter here in New England. We had one really frigid stretch where it never got above 10 and got as low as -15 at night. During that stretch we burned 100 gallons of oil in a 13 day period to heat our 1500 sq foot house to 60-62.
The point being that home heating is not a luxury but an unavoidable necessity, regardless of how many layers you where.
Which is not to dismiss the unpleasantness and danger of heat. As weāve discussed here before, there are places in Central and Southern America where the heat and humidity are starting to exceed levels that the human body can compensate for naturally and weāre starting to see a rise in renal failure as a result.
Youāre kidding, right? First you argue that sunlight is too weak an energy source to melt snow accumulated on a roof; then, when the error youāre making is pointed out to you, you argue that snow canāt accumulate on a roof?
They do, but their advantage is that they are actual figures.
This is funny for two reasons: First, because what follows is yet another thought experiment, and second because this entire conversation is based on your own idea, in the absence of underlying data, that people living in NY use more energy than people living in Texas. If thatās not a bad thought experiment, I donāt know what is.
Really, itās hard not to conclude that nothing youāve offered in this argument should be taken seriously. Youāve made a string of errors (conflating congestion with traffic, claiming that rural and suburban dwellers use less energy than urban ones, implying that the government doesnāt subsidize suburban living, claiming that Texans use less energy than New Yorkers, misapplying physical laws, etc) and what you do when youāre called on them is basically move on to the next one without ever re-examining your original claim in light of the correction. Thereās an expression for this kind of behavior.
This may well be true. Indeed, Iām ready to believe it. But can you actually produce any data which demonstrates that it is true? Somehow, I doubt it.
They are actual figures, but they are also irrelevant.
As you recall, you proposed incentives for people to move into cities, because urban homes are intrinsically more energy efficient. And so my question is whether a home in the south is intrinsically more energy-efficient than a home in the north. Whether that home is surrounded by energy-efficient offices or energy-intensive farms is irrelevant.
A typical furnace uses 100,000 BTU per hour, which is about 30 kW. A typical central A/C unit uses about 5 kW.
EDIT:
Hereās a nice government chart, and even a pull quote:
Due to the longer heating seasons, the Northeast and Midwest regions still,
consume the most energy per household, at 108 and 112 Million Btu per
household in 2009, respectively.
Because urban living is intrinsically more energy efficient.
Itās a question, but you havenāt answered it, and the actual data weāve looked at suggests it isnāt, and itās irrelevant to the question of whether urban living is more energy efficient. It is. The data show it is.
This is just one bad-faith argument after another. Iām through.
Due to the longer heating seasons, the Northeast and Midwest regions still, consume the most energy per household, at 108 and 112 Million Btu per household in 2009, respectively.
I think the question has been answered definitively.
Maybe you didnāt like the answer.
I donāt doubt it.
But if you think the government should eliminate economic incentives for suburban development in an effort to move people to the city, then logically they should also eliminate economic incentives in northern/Midwestern states, in an effort to move people/jobs to the south.
Personally that kind of thinking seems too extremist, but YMMV.
There you go again.
If you donāt want to be accused of arguing in bad faith, donāt argue in bad faith.