Reply #71: How much did your solar installation cost?

[hunter]

I mean both you and the taxpayers, if your installation was subsidized.

Maybe we should devolop some kind of Haitian home exchange program here. You can swap houses for a year with some Haitian who doesn't have electric service. You can bring your solar panels with you if you like, and nail them to his roof, but you have to do that on his income. I wonder how much nails sell for in Haiti? Should you buy nails, or should you eat? I don't know, it's a hard decision, I'm sure.

Here's what I don't get... How are the desires of some guy making less than two dollars a day different than yours? How come you get a 100 amp electric service, and he might get a few watts of solar? I mean it's like eating a huge meal at your own table, while you toss the poor fellow a few crumbs. You think he doesn't want a lot of electric lights in his house, a television, a computer, an oven, a microwave oven, a stove, a refrigerator, and all those nice things that electricity makes possible? Or are you just living out your fantasy of decentralized power at some anonymous person's expense? Yeah, he'll be satisfied with a few LED lights while you live high on the hog burning through the world's limited resources like there is no tomorrow.

You've really backed yourself into one of two very unpleasant corners here, greyhound1966. Either you don't know what you are talking about, or you are blinded by the old curse of manifest destiny -- that it is somehow your innate right to live better than most of the people on this earth, that it is a consequnce of God's Will and your own hard work, when in fact, it is mostly an accident of your birth.

I'm not belittling whatever accomplishments you may have, but when you get right down to it, most of what we accomplish in life has more to do with the circumstances of the community we find ourselves in than it does our own determination.

If you want to know a place like Haiti as something more than an abstract playground for solar fantasies you can ask people who do work like this:

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/haiti.cfm