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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31055 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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And gas stoves are a great Schelling fencepost, because taking away gas burners from the kitchen naturally suggests removing all the gas from home: gas room heating, gas water heater, and home gas electricity generators for rural or distant/fancy suburban areas.

Just like guns provide security, gas provides power. Having people who can control their own room heat, water heat, food cooking, and even flow of electricity, instead of relying on state-regulated power, is a nightmare for an authoritarian state. The centralization of power is a real project for the Cathedral, and we know it, and holding onto our freedoms by our bare fingernails can include such ridiculous-seeming projects like keeping our gas stoves.

If centralisation and dependence was the goal they would ban at-home solar instead of (sometimes) subsidising it.

As others have mentioned, there's no need to ban at-home solar if you want to centralize power. A revolutionary who can't generate enough heat to cook the chemicals for a pipe bomb when it's too cloudy out isn't much of a concern. Not to mention that anyone who can lay out $20k + for solar and battery backup that'll last a couple days at best isn't going to be part of the uprising.

Most at-home solar electricity nowadays goes directly into the grid, not to your home. You can be experiencing a grid brown-out or scheduled blackout during the hottest days of summer, leaving you with no AC in full sunlight and your panels at peak watts, and your generating station agreement with the local electric utility means you’re not allowed to add an inverter without penalties. It’s the perfect example of centralisation and dependence.

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You don't even need to be that distant suburban. In 2021 the same February storm that caused the Texas power crisis also caused outages in Oregon on the order 5 days up to almost two weeks all through the major metro area. That's a long time to be without power and unlike in Texas the natural gas lines were still operating (as were natgas powered standby generators).

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