In my grandfather’s lifetime, the US economy had already make a successful, peaceful and interruptive transition from whale oil to coal oil. It took over 50 years to do that. Later, it took about 50 years to make another peaceful and economic transition from whale oil to coal oil. In my father’s lifetime, we transitioned from coal oil to crude oil.
Each time, there was an orderly introduction of new equipment that used the new fuel source and old equipment that used the old fuel was decommissioned as the equipment became worn out and not worth replacing.
Today, entire industries, such as air freight, can operate in their present business model based on the costs as they are today. Their business models would break and they would go bankrupt if some external force suddenly imposed a forced transition to new, unproven, and much more expensive capital equipment. Worse, nobody considers the safety and reliability issues associated with decades and generations of experience in producing and operating such equipment.
Nothing good will come of forcing these issues before the people involved can absorb and properly deal with the changes. And the point of my reply was simple: what we are going through is entirely unnecessary: we have done this to ourselves by imposing restrictions on our own oil industry.
We are the ones kicking ourselves.
Oh I did’t mean to say it would all happen over night, even the manhatten project didn’t translate into nuclear power stations until the late 40’s early 50’s(we got to explode bombs first). But it wouldn’t take much time for even the smallest changes to begin to show dramatic effects and this new type of Solar siding is one small step into the future!