Solar Power (Not Much Improved Since 1950), "Global "warming", and Red Skelton: Rotating Solar Houses (a 1950 "IBMer idea?)

Did you think that "solar power" (passive or active) was a new thing? Do you believe that environmental fanaticism is a new thing--environmentalists only becoming fanatic because of the (manufactured, false) "crisis" of man-made "global warming"? Think again.


Go all of the way back to `1950, now about SIXTY years ago. The movie was "The Yellow Cab Man" (funny in a way movies now generally aren't--rating 76 out of 100). A substantial plot element in the movie was a "home show" rotating solar house. I am not making this up. The movie explained a "rotating solar house" as a house rotated by a motor in such a way as to keep properly oriented to the sun ("move with the sun" was the movie description) to provide maximum energy efficiency.


Doesn't this sound like an idea that a house builder today might come up with, for the sole purpose of getting a Federal subsidy? You can well imagine good ol' boy economic fascist T. Boone Pickens pushing for subdivisions of "rotating" solar houses, or at least some more plausible variation of the idea. The concept is funnier now, in this era of environmental lunacy, than it was in 1950 (the movie was making fun of the idea then). Nope, I don't know if any "rotating solar houses" were actually built, since even I was only three years old in 1950.


Doesn't matter whether any such ridiculous houses were built, does it? Of course not. The point is that people (primarily environmentalists?) were talking about solar houses in 1950. In some sixty years since, solar power has still not become economic. Without Federal subsidies (taxpayer money to support an industry that has essentially failed for sixty years) , the industry would still not exist--except as a curiosity and in small niches. Yes, we are SLIGHTLY better able to produce active solar power now, while the idea was probably mainly passive in 1950. It is still not economic, or the industry would not need taxpayer subsidies to survive.


Yes, I was tickled by the "rotating solar house". It raised fanciful images in my minds of houses that not only change orientation with regard to the sun, but TRAVEL with the sun (flying house trailers?). This is fanciful because the sun does not travel, but the Earth rotates some 25,000 miles in a single day.


What is serious about this are two things:


1. Think of how much it DISTORTS the allocation of resources--not to mention increases in the deficit we can't afford--to make a central planning decision that we need to develop solar power, instead of other alternatives. Sixty years of failure (basically) mean nothing to central planners with a political agenda. Yes, it is entirely possible that we will have a breakthrough in solar power i the next decade, but the last sixty years show that we may not have such a breakthrough. Further, subsidizing UNECONOMIC solar power systems does NOT increase the likelihood that ECONOMIC solar power will be developed (which requires breakthroughs in technologythat would make a fortune without any Federal subsidy). That is the point. Economic solar power dos not need a subsidy. Uneconomic solar power does not deserve one.

2. It has always ben obvious that leftists in general, and "environmental" leftists in particular (who often use "environmental" issues like "global warming" as merely an excuse for a Federal Government takeover of the economy), have ALWAYS wanted to CONTROL our lives, and have ALWAYS wanted the very things they say they want now because of "global warming". That is what makes people like me so angry about "global warming". It is a fraud being used for political purposes. Its proponents could care less aboutt he "science". They want this stuff anyway. People who have lived as long as I have have seen various EXCUSES for leftist action in the name of environmental "crisis". From "global cooling" in 1970 environmental speak to scares over DDT and other pesticides, the left has tried to get control by cynical USE of the "environment. Yes, clean water and air are good things, but the ultimate goal of the left has been CONTROL rather than clean air and water. This absurdity about "greenhouse gases" conclusively shows that, since greenhouse gases have nothing at all to do with "clean" air and water.