"Jane, You Ignorant Slut..."

h/t Kenny

Kenny, over at Knuckledraggin' My Life Away, grabs all kinds of articles, some funny, some interesting, and some raise-your-blood-pressure mad. Some all of the above in one go.
As an actual native Californian now happily ensconced in Tennessee, he chooses a number of articles from here in Califrutopia to point out the liberal stupidity rampant hereabouts (which is shooting fish in a barrel, but hey, those fish aren't going to shoot themselves, are they?).

I'm happy to cheer and jeer, hoot, holler, and howl along with the rest, but having actual skin in the game, my take can be and is a bit different from people whose sole experience of CA is from their TV sets, or a one-time trip to Disneyland.

So came this article on the recent decision to mandate solar panels on new home construction, in a state struggling to meet the power demands of its native relatives, the transplanted toothless banjo-playing liberal kinfolks of yours from the Other 49, and way too damn many illegal aliens hopping the border fence for the last 40 years:

(SACRAMENTO) Californiarutopia became the first state in the country Wednesday to require new homes to have solar panels on their roofs.
The mandate, which goes into effect in 2020, won unanimous approval of the California Energy Commission, one of whom predicted the “green” lifestyle regulation will go national.

And frankly, the shock and screaming got a little too silly for me.

 "I’m thinking you guys have this bassackwards.
They should have been doing this with new homes and businesses here decades ago.
Now, with current panel prices, it’s financially recockulous not to. 

AZ, NM, and TX should be doing the same thing for new construction.
(But if y’all would rather burn up oil to replace what you could get from the sun, and send petro-dollars to Islamic states to fund terrorists to come over here and go all ‘splodey, go on ahead.
Price of oil drops, and you defund raghead jihadis, and Russians, and Venezuelan socialists, and get more cheap gasoline for your SUVs, bass boats, and ATVs. You do the math.) 

It’s also evidently slipped everyone’s mind that having running water and functional shitters installed is “mandatory” too. Or maybe some of you folks catch rainwater in whisky barrels to drink, and shit off the front porch, I dunno. 

Nobody’s telling them to have a full self-contained solar system.
(But frankly, living in a state that’s got sunshine about 300 days/year most places, you’re an ignorant asshole if you didn’t do that already.) 

But installed panels will cut the strain on the grid, self-power heat and A/C at the times of the day and year it’s most needed, and cut back on pollution from local power plants.
(They also short-stop solar gain to the attic in the summer in the first place. Double win.) 

It’ll also, it should be noted, cut your own daily power bill. And possibly allow you to sell the excess back to the utility. 

I wouldn’t build so much as a garden shed here without putting a solar panel on the south facing side, and anyone with 40-50 2’x4’ panels and a battery bank back-up could be 100% off-grid, 24/7/365 even in downtown. After being off-grid involuntarily for 11 days straight after the Northridge earthquake, I’ll let anyone ponder why that set-up might not be a bad idea in a state with earthquakes large and small as a regular feature of living here. 

The cost of batteries would probably run little more than the power costs outright, with the added bonus of no rate increase, no dependence on far-away utility princes, no permanent bills, no intrusive busybody “smart” meters, and no electric company jackass nosing around the non-existent meter 12X/yr., and phoning in anything “suspicious” to the local constabulary or building permit officers.

It’s not jacking up the cost of a house. It’s just transferring the amortized cost into the front end.

You’re going to pay for the power either way. 

If the higher up-front prices weeds out more riff-raff moving here from Bumfuck,Egypt, that’s just icing on the cake."

 Whereupon I was chastised thusly:

Bullshit.
Are you aware less than 1/2 0f 1% of electricity in the USA is generated using Oil?
Coal, Nat Gas & Hydro & Nuclear are all domestic., none are sourced by Towelheads outside North America.

Hi, I'm Aesop. Please, by all means, try to baffle me with statistics. Because I don't think or use math for a living, let alone a blog-hobby, so that'll totally work for you.

So you’re telling me that dumping the petroleum that makes 21,000,000,000 kWh of energy produced by using oil back onto the spot market isn’t going to affect the price of gasoline?
Pull the other leg, it’s got bells on it.

1/2 of 1% of 4 TRILLION kWh of energy is one helluva lot of tanks of gas. It’s 36,000,000 barrels of oil, or 18 entire supertankers’ worth.
(You can go to the same EIA website and figure that out in about 90 seconds of math.)
This where the old “figures don’t lie, but liars figure” argument comes from.

And are you aware that there’s damned little hydro, and only one nuclear power plant in CA, when last I looked?
Kinda narrows it down some, and the nearest coal fields are a couple thousand miles away, and natural gas only gets you so far. So I should be sad there’s less coal gas in the sky here, and less diesel from trains pulling it across an entire continent?

Are you aware PV already generates three times the power oil does nationwide, right now?

Yak all you want about the numbers; home solar removes the necessity of the grid in the first place, doubly so with actual in-home battery storage, and it works when the grid doesn’t.
Beat that in a state with 300 days/yr of sunshine.
Then get back to me.

If Maine was doing this, or Michigan or Alaska, I could see the point of bitching.
For FL, Hawaii, and the southern border states, it’s a slam-dunk.

Alternatively, we could just move all the toothless banjo-playing kinfolks here from Everywhere Else back where they came from, and build the Great Wall of Trump, followed by shipping the illegals back home too, and we won’t need to worry about solar panels hereabouts.

But that’d probably require us to stop listening to nominally Republican senators and congressmen from Florida, Arizona, South Carolina, among other places, yapping about how amnesty for douchebag illegals was a great idea.

But their cousins would be back home in their families’ laps, so I can see where that plan would suck for everyone thereabouts.

I may seem like another "Get off my lawn" guy, but I appreciate it when people throw some bullshit back, to force me to dig out the details in an argument. No, really.
Because now I know I was right, and by exactly how much, after untwisting the barrels of oil and kilowatt hours and number of supertankers of oil we're talking about.

And as I noted in later comments, yes, I'd much prefer that they'd have incentivized this than mandated it, but please, bear with me, and try to think about exactly which knee-jerkingly Leftardian jackholes in the Califrutopia legislature we're talking about.

They've had a good idea (which for them, is probably as rare an event as can be found in nature), which also explains why they're thus going about it exactly the wrong way.

But true scorn and ridicule ought to be saved for their blisteringly stupid jackassical masterpiece turds, of which they mint far too many, day after day, and year after year.

But they can't print money, so the whole dipshit disasterpiece is headed towards an inevitable fiscal cliff, and The Coming Reckoning, inevitable as it will be terrible, is going to fix a lot of that, albeit in the same way Vesuvius cleaned up Pompeii.