Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [95]
Perhaps this belief blinded appropriate technologists to the actual desires of the people who might buy their products. “What extremes of temperature within a house are comfortable?” Steve Baer asked. “In a dry climate like Albuquerque I believe year lows and highs of 55 degrees and 85 degrees are perfectly easy to live with inside a house—especially if you have warm spots such as fireplaces or stoves to stand next to when it is chilly.”21 That most people do not want to live in homes that get that hot or cold and are willing to make generous use of the HVAC industry to avoid doing so should come as no surprise.
Political scientist Langdon Winner indicted appropriate technologists for their failure “to face squarely the facts of organized social and political power. Fascinated by dreams of a spontaneous grassroots revolution, they avoided any deep-seeking analysis of the institutions that control the direction of technological and economic development.”22 This means that while they were out picking new lifestyles as a deep revolutionary gesture, the rest of the world carried on passing laws and building new power plants and developing new stuff like computers, fiber optics, and the sports utility vehicle. The appropriate technology movement wasn’t squashed; it was simply sidestepped or ignored. Although Baer’s company has succeeded in carving out a niche and continues to this day, few others did.
One honest alternative technologist, Peter Harper, well-known in the UK and the States for his work in the field and writing in the magazine Undercurrents, blasted the idea that everyone would want to live in solar homes powered by meager amounts of wind and run on large amounts of self-provided labor. Harper wrote that
it’s my guess that, faced with the real choices and real costs, nearly everybody would opt to stay in the straight society as things are at the moment. Apparent successes of cheap alternative technologies have on the whole been achieved through hidden subsidies of time or resources which could not be generalized throughout society. At the moment, only those with very unusual tastes (such as for Spartan living), or those who place an extremely high value on environmental purity, or those that think that the relative positions of ‘straight’ and ‘alternative’ economics will change markedly, would find it rational to pay the full cost of ATs.23
Few have been willing to make those tradeoffs throughout the years. It’s not that there isn’t a thriving off-grid energy community or that the neo-homestead movement has gone away; rather, it’s become a niche, like the group of people who love Italianate homes and Porsche 911s. Industrialized societies allow both types of people to happily coexist and subsidize them both in different ways. Harper went on to challenge,
Why not have computers, power stations, TV, hi-fi sets, and laboursaving devices? What exactly is the case against them? Why not distribute electricity through a grid? When were you last oppressed by the local electricity board? How much of what you need can you get in a community of 10? 100? 1000? 10,000? Make a list of all the things you have in your home. How many could you do without? How many could you make yourself? How many are made on a massive scale and would cost five times more made in any other way?24
Bespoke technologies have a difficult time competing in a world that expects very high levels of service and reliable products from companies. The products alternative technologists built rarely made it through the “various stages of development, debugging, and deployment that any new technology needs.”25 Basically, many didn’t work. In 1980 a surprisingly hopeful book called Solar Failure detailed the numerous ways that systems broke. The authors’ intent was not to “discourage the layman by bombarding him with an endless list of failures” but rather to help out in “truly triumphant” solar undertakings that would avoid the mistakes that