I don’t know enough about climate science to critique much of what Levitt/Dubbner write, but there’s something that gets me because it’s so typical:
“The problem with solar cells is that they’re black.” Try googling “solar cells” — [Nathan, you can Bing “solar cells”] — and most of the panels you’ll see are in fact blue. I’ll call this half a howler. Lots of the cells are black. As we’ll see, however, it is NOT a problem. This is a bogus issue.
Now, I’m sure Levitt/Dubner would say this is a small thing, call off the pedant police, blah blah blah and so on. But the trouble is anecdotes (that’s sort of what this is, though it’s a bit worse) define a lot of our discourse. Al Gore said he invented the internet! The Clinton people took the “W” keys off the type writer! And this isn’t the first time Levitt/Dubner have gone in for an anecdotal whopper — Felix Salmon busted them peddling the “Shithead” urban legend in their last book.
The great thing about anecdotes is when you get busted on them, you can just say “who cares?” even if your entire methodology is built on anecdotes. I’m not saying that Freakonomics’ entire methodology is built on anecdotes, but David Brooks’ work (for example) is and his snotty, arrogant reply to Sasha Issenberg’s fact check of a Brooks Atlantic piece illustrates this perfectly:
I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end … ” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but Id id have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”
[…..]“What I try to do is describe the character of places, and hopefully things will ring true to people,” Brooks explained. “In most cases, I think the way I describe it does ring true, and in some places it doesn’t ring true. If you were describing a person, you would try to grasp the essential character and in some way capture them in a few words. And if you do it as a joke, there’s a pang of recognition.”
The dishonesty of all this is amazing. Brooks eats at a few chain restaurants in lieu of doing actual research; and then when he can’t milk enough meaning out of the baby-back ribs and Jack Daniels chicken, he just starts making things up. What Levitt/Dubner do, I’m afraid, isn’t so different. Levitt admits he does “economics of pimping” type stuff because it’s so difficult to get ahead going traditional research. And then, not content with that, he has to lie in order to sex up his already lightweight, sexed up book.
It’s pathetic.
tofubo
actually, clinton took that key off my typewriter, that’s why i’ve always had to spell it UU.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Interesting way to rub elbows with the commoners and take their pulse at the same time. He could just save himself some time and pull facts out of his ass and write about those.
Oh, right…
General Winfield Stuck
And I think Gore really did invent the internet. Why? because I believe, that’s why.
beltane
They’ve been suspect in my mind ever since I first heard them interviewed on NPR a couple of years ago. One argument of theirs really bothered me: the one where they claimed that the drop in the crime rate during the 1990’s was attributable to the legalization of abortion in the 1970’s, since unwanted children were no longer being born, and that these unwanted children were the ones who became criminals. While the argument could conceivably make sense, the evidence was flimsy at best, and no other possible factors were even mentioned, let alone disproved. Anyway, the interview left me thinking they strove to make provocative arguments just for the sake of creating a tiny ripple of shock.
Comrade Jake
There were all kinds of problems with their chapter on climate change, and they’re rightfully being called to the carpet on it. I think they may have seriously overstepped here. Their new book seems to be mostly getting attention for what it fucked up, which is probably not where they wanted it to be.
Comrade Jake
Actually this paragraph in the first link you posted nails it, IMO:
Brian J
Perhaps that’s the big difference between the first and second book. Matt Yglesias said earlier today that the first book was built around Levitt’s interesting, award-winning research, whereas the second is not. I haven’t read either, but if that’s the big difference, you have to wonder what allowed Levitt to be okay with basing what was bound to be a big book on a lot less solid grounds.
In my mind, anecdotes are fine for illustrating a larger picture or serving as the basis for investigating a particular trend, but it’s not right to stop there.
As for whether it’s possible to get further with pop culture-like research, that seems to make sense, but what happens when everyone starts doing the same? Doesn’t it become a whole lot less special? Unless he’s more concerned with selling books than advancing in academia, why doesn’t he focus on the more traditional problems that have been a hot topic among economists, like inequality, technology’s effect on wages, or something else? Or why not take a route similar to what Jeffrey Sachs appears to be doing, which is, well, trying to save the world? He appears to be everywhere, so he has the celebrity factor, but his work seems a little more substantial.
Litlebritdifrnt
Speaking of solar power can anyone please explain to me this: why the ever loving fuck are homes on the west coast (CA etc) and on the east coast (NC, SC, GA, FL etc) NOT built with solar cells in the roof? I mean come on, we get sun a good 300 days per year, don’t tell me you couldn’t sell the additional cost of putting in those solar panels with the related savings in power bills to the potential home buyers? If I win the lottery the first thing I am going to do is replace my entire roof with solar panels. And another thing, my house has a fireplace, when I was a kid, we had two fireplaces in our house, both of them had a “thingy” which you pulled down to direct the heat from the chimney to the hot water heater, so every time we had a fire we heated the water in the water heater. Why is this not done in modern houses with fire places? Help please, it seems we have regressed in these issues and not advanced.
beltane
@Litlebritdifrnt: I don’t understand why they don’t install solar hot water heaters in those states. They are relatively inexpensive and would provide virtually all of a home’s hot water needs.
Notorious P.A.T.
My guess is: because that would require investing a little more in home construction, leading to slightly lower profits for the builders, and we just can not have that. If we had a government during the past 8 years that gave tax credits for solar panels. . .
This is not cutting-edge science. Solar power cells are over a hundred years old. You know what Einstein won his Nobel Prize for? Figuring out why solar cells work. Instead of that, we have to listen to idiots chanting “drill baby drill”. Depressing.
Litlebritdifrnt
@beltane:
It is nice to know that I am not insane on this issue. Thank you!
Notorious P.A.T.
I would love to hear what he thinks would happen to that sunlight if it *weren’t* radiated as heat by solar panels.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Notorious P.A.T.:
Pisses me off to no end, I tell you, I was down at the beach this weekend, there were rows and rows of beach houses, I guess I counted two with solar panels. It makes no sense whatsoever.
mclaren
In a larger sense, I see the Levitt/Dubner Freakanomics drivel and the Malcolm Galdwell Blink twaddle as parts of a coherent whole in the noughties media narrative that includes The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The End of History and the Last Man and The Pentagon’s New Map.
During the noughties we had people running our government who rejected facts, derided the very concept of expertise, made sh*t up, lied outright and then smirked about it and admitted as much and then told everyone it didn’t matter. (Remember the famous “reality based” quote…?)
Levitt & Dubner and Malcolm Gladwell simply hopped on the bandwagon of fact-contemptuous expertise-deriding lying-and-then-claiming-it-doesn’t-matter mindset that took over America for those 8 years. These guys tapped into a wellspring of populist no-neck contempt for observed reality and “elite” expertise and they got rich and famous doing it. Villagers like Bill Kriston and Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria (who was one of the planners of the Iraq invasion back in 2001) played the same game and got even richer and more famous.
Now that reality has set in and that mindset has become unfashionable, guys like Levit and Dubner and Gladwell balk at finding themselves relegated to the fringes of the legitimate discourse out where the buses don’t run along with the teabaggers and the ufologists and the psychic surgeons and the Project for a New American Century guys.
Well, tough tit, fellas. You rode the wave of anti-intellectualism and you got rich and famous doing it. Now the ride’s over. Just be happy you get to keep all the loot you made off the original Freakanomics book. In a just world, you’d have been tarred and feathered and forced to return every penny you made off that atrocious trash.
Notorious P.A.T.
Well, when Obama’s ACORN gestapo start forcing conservatives into concentration camps we will all be able to put solar panels on their roofs unopposed. Along with artwork glorifying Mussolini:
http://www.politicususa.com/en/Olbermann-Beck
DougJ
In a larger sense, I see the Levitt/Dubner Freakanomics drivel and the Malcolm Galdwell Blink twaddle as parts of a coherent whole in the noughties media narrative that includes The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The End of History and the Last Man and The Pentagon’s New Map.
I think that’s probably unfair to Gladwell. And also possibly to Levitt/Dubner.
Citizen_X
@Litlebritdifrnt: Never mind the coasts, why isn’t every new house in the sun belt built with photoelectric solar panels?
When do they have the greatest electrical load? In the summer.
Why? Air conditioning.
When’s the greatest amount of insolation (=amount of solar energy available) occur? Durrrrrrr…
Comrade Jake
I don’t know how well known it is, but Google’s campus has a massive solar farm right over a huge parking deck for their employees. I think the farm provides about a third of their energy needs, the panels provide shade for the cars in the deck, and people can even plug in their hybrids.
The tragedy is that I’ve never seen such a smart idea duplicated. Just lots and lots of parking lots with cars baking in the sun.
MobiusKlein
How about “don’t infer too much from noisy data”
Or 1 in 20 studies will be invalid purely by chance at the 95% confidence level.
Eric U.
@Litlebritdifrnt:
My understanding is that it takes a lot of effort to overcome the obstacles to building with solar panels. I remember reading that insurance for the builder is problematic, and the building code guys aren’t used to it either. People think solar panels are ugly. And if you think about it, you have to have an electrician that really knows what he is doing. In my last house, I had to re-wire a light circuit and an outlet. Neither of these circuits could have worked, ever. The electrician just screwed up, and I was the first person that cared enough to do anything about it.
This apparently is enough that most builders don’t get over their original reluctance to try something new. It probably will take a large developer to reverse this problem. Or a solar power company that really pushes itself on builders with an easy to use system. I do think we are probably getting there.
Calouste
@Notorious P.A.T.:
Man, that quote is a RedState level of stupid.
Little Macayla's Friend
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Litlebritdifrnt, you and many others may not need to win the lottery or even move to Arizona.
This twist to the usual solar story is that 335 homeowners banded together to get a bulk deal, savings around 25%:
http://www.portlandtribune.com/sustainable/story.php?story_id=125477784816925200
Eric U.
It’s funny that the solar panel color subject started being discussed this week, because I was just thinking about how the fact that the energy is removed from the solar radiation must mean that less heat goes into the house or is re-radiated. One other fact that these guys didn’t take into account is that color isn’t always the greatest indication of heat transfer capability. My heat transfer book has a table in the back; some white paints actually absorb more energy than some black paints. It’s not a simple subject.
slag
This post is technically true but collectively nonsense.
Little Macayla's Friend
@Little Macayla’s Friend:
The drawback this (free) newspaper forgot to mention is that it involves some sockulism for one of the basic means of production. You get what you pay for.
jl
Maybe Tim F. is talking about the Freakonomics NYTimes column, which is quite light and anecdotal, and for which reason I stopped reading it regularly a long ago. Though sometimes i check it out because it does have links to interesting new papers.
But the book Freakonomics is more a dramatically enhanced report of Levitt’s research. So I agree with Brian J that the difference is that the new book is not reporting research that has been subjected to peer review, or any kind of review at all.
But there is a larger point about the kind of research that Levitt does, and which was first discussed in a TNR review that a commenter linked to on the previous post on this topic. (https://balloon-juice.com/?p=28410#comment-1406678)
Levitt’s research, as is much recent ‘clever’ research in economics that makes it seem like the field mgaically explains every single thing in the world, is based on clever ways to untangle different causal factors and reach a surprising conclusion about how you can measure the effect of small or unlikely factors in an unexpected way.
The TNR review said that Levitt-style research is ‘ruining’ economics, but was a little vague on exactly how it was doing that. I tried to figure out what the TNR review was trying to get at. And I think there are two issues.
The first has to do with statistical technique. The TNR review used the economics jargon words ‘identification’ and ‘instrument’ for the statistical concepts behind this kind of research. The idea is to find some natural experiment or a reasonable hypothesis about a pattern of causes that reveals one particular causal relationship that is not confused with other unrelated factors (that, roughly speaking. is identification). Or, to find some variable that is has the right pattern of correlations and lack of correlations needed to estimate the relationship (that, roughly speaking is finding a good ‘instrument’).
I think one thing the TNR guy had in mind is that achieving ‘identification’ and finding an good ‘instrument’ are very difficult to test directly. Usually they rest on assumptions made by the economists and supported by indirect arguments and evidence. So, I think one of the TNR’s points is that one interesting paper in this kind of research is not really very strong evidence, because it is so difficult to test for the validity of critical elements of the statistical method.
So, typically, in important issues, you would want to see several papers using independent data sets, or at least two independent teams working on the same data reaching a similar result. Or maybe (and this is really tough in economics) produce a predictive model and make forecasts that are ‘good’ compared to the average predictive success in economics (say, better than a coin flip). But as far as I know, Levitt has skipped from one Freakonomics result to another in his work, without going back to see how his conclusions hold up with independent data, or out of sample. I am not sure about this, but that is my impression. I will have to check.
The other thing is that it is a very long leap from these kinds of results to making serious policy on important issues. In order to make policy recommendations you need to ask whether the results are practically significant, or maybe minor in the big scheme of things, but just have statistical significance (you can have a very signiticant effect that is small in any practical sense). Is the behavior a result of equilibrium market behavior or not, or is it a result of disequilibrium adjustment or evolutionary processes? Are there other factors that could change that would dwarf the results you found?
Economists like Stiglitz (economics of information), and Krugman (economic geography and financial crises), and (to include some one who hase been called a ‘stolid conservative’) Heckamn (educational achievement, and economic and social influences on child development) have pounded way on a few topics: confirming initial results, testing their previous findings on new data, generating new hypotheses from prevous research for further testing. And, they have made actual real forecasts and predictions.
So, there are limitations to Levitt’s body of work. He may have followed up on some of his research results to see if they have been confirmed, I will have to check, and I am particularly interested in his results on abortion and the crime rates. But I think he has done this less than some other economists.
But the main point of my comment is that, compared to other sciences, one paper of this kind of research is not very strong evidence. And I wonder if the researchers who specialize in sequentail unrelated Freakonomics results on unrelated topics, have developed kind of research skills needed to confirm results, and recognize reliable versus unreliable results.
General Winfield Stuck
@slag:
lolz
jl
Oops, sorry. This is DougJ’s post, not Tim F’s. I guess I was thinking of that pretty picture of the leaf on the ground that I liked so much.
Also. DougJ might consider excerpting the part of the article where Brooks asserts that is unethical for the reporter to fact check his work.
Warren Terra
@ lilbritdfrnt
My guess is similar to Notorious’s: houses are built cheaply as possible, and few house-buying decisions are strongly affected by energy efficiency, environmentalism, or utility bills.
mclaren
Dougj asserts
Oh?
My criticism of Malcolm Gladwell and Tipett and Dubner is mild compared to the people who have really come down hard on these clowns.
The Dumb, Dumb World Of Malcolm Gladwell
Or see:
Why Malcolm Gladwell Thinks We Have Little Control Over Our Success
Or check out:
This review slamming Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point.”
I could cite plenty more. Malcolm Gladwell is an unserious dilettante who slaps together a bunch of anecdotes in support of a sensational and counterintuitive thesis and then writes a snappy bestseller out of that farrago of half-formed ideas and untestable claims and just-so stories. He’s much worse than Friedman, because sensible educated people realize Friedman’s just winging it, they know he doesn’t have a PhD in economics…but sensible educated people actually think Gladwell is someone to be taken seriously.
Brachiator
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Winning the lottery is the way to go. A solar home energy system can cost as much as $20,000, and the return on investment is not all that clear, especially if you don’t intend on living in the house for a long time. One of the FAQs on solar energy costs can be found here:
http://www.thesolarguide.com/solar-power-uses/cost-faq.aspx
And as someone else noted in this thread, people don’t do solar because it’s ugly. Think this is stupid? In California, land of brush fires, a lot of people kept avoiding fire resistant roofing material because they thought that it was aesthetically displeasing.
And you don’t have to get your freakonomics on to understand that people often will put their pocketbook and personal comfort before a more abstract allegiance to the environment.
tootiredoftheright
@Eric U.:
Well builders don’t even want to put in a attic fans which in about six months or so pay for themselves in energy reduction costs.
Attic fans btw in the summer time reduce cooling costs since they blow out hot air in the attic and in the winter reduce heating costs since they blow out the moisture that builds up in the attic.
Warren Terra
@ lilbritdfrnt
On the other hand, with some tax credits, marketing, and cost-benefit analysis, aftermarket home installation could be a good business – it already is for some consultants to big firms.
tootiredoftheright
@Brachiator:
Thing is solar cells, and a lot of other energy saving tech in the long run helps one’s pocketbook but don’t seem to grasp that.
For a long time refrigerator manufactorers opposed efforts to make their products more energy efficent.
Now refrigerators are less heavy, often have more space in them, work far better, cheaper to construct, cheaper to own. People buy far more refrigerators then ever before. All of this wouldn’t be possible without energy efficency being applied.
mclaren
As for why everyone in CA doesn’t have solar cells on top of their houses:
[1] They used to cost a fscking fortune, as others have pointed out. Only in the last few years have solar cells come down in cost to the point where it’s economically sensible;
[2] The banks of batteries cost almost as much as the solar cells themselves, you have to replace the batteries every few years, and, worst of all, solar power is absolutely rotten at powering appliances that draw huge current spikes, like air conditioners;
[3] And then of course there’s the issue of thievery. You invest 20 grand in solar cells and come home to find someone stole ’em.
A better question would be: Why do so many apartment buildings in CA have black tarpaper roofs instead of a reflective coating?
Warren Terra
Brachiator’s point about needing 20 years before an expensive energy-efficiency change pays for itself is good. You can’t expect that if you sell after 5/20 years, the buyer will pay 3/4 of the cost.
Brachiator
@tootiredoftheright:
People grasp this. But in an uncertain economy, asking people to front an extra 20 grand for solar is not a winning proposition.
And the bigger thing is that solar panels are ugly. Say you are buying a Tudor style home. You look at the solar FAQ and see this:
Goodbye solar.
Also, the cost of replacing and repairing solar installations is downplayed, compared to the cost of repairing conventional roofing.
I take your point about refrigerators. However, the biggest obstacle to solar comes from home buyers, not home manufacturers. And refrigerator manufacturers had to continue to make their products convenient and aesthetically pleasing as they pursued energy efficiency. Flat panel TV manufacturers have to follow a similar path in the face of California requirements for greater energy efficiency in these products.
Wile E. Quixote
@tootiredoftheright
Yes, but could you survive a nuclear explosion in one like you could in those old 1950’s fridges that were conveniently lined with plenty of radiation absorbing lead.
Oh, am I the only one who thinks that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull would have been a much better movie if the fridge had landed door down trapping Indy.
TenguPhule
No.
SATSQ.
Wile E. Quixote
@mclaren
No kidding, and not just in CA. I live in Washington state and need to reroof my house. I have a southern exposure so a large part of my roof gets a lot of sun on our long summer days. So I started looking for roofing materials that reflected as much solar energy as possible (and which, during our short winter days, will radiate less heat). There are some materials out there, but not as many as you’d think.
This is a real no-brainer. It would be interesting if someone used Google Earth to figure out how many low-albedo roofs there were in any given area and how much heat is being absorbed by them, and then re-radiated at night contributing to the urban heat-island effect.
As far as solar cells go any problems with their albedo could be remedied by coating them with glass that was treated to reflect UV and IR radiation. Ideally you’d coat them with a material that reflected anything outside of the bandgap of the PV material, but that’s more difficult, but UV and IR reflective coatings aren’t that hard to do and would improve cell efficiency while reducing albedo. You’d think that Nathan Myhrvold would know this but apparently he doesn’t. I’ve always felt that Myhrvold got hired at Microsoft because Bill Gates felt inadequate about his lack of education and Myhrvold was able to baffle him with bullshit and show him his shiny degrees. Myhrvold started the Microsoft Research division in 1991, you’d think if he was anything other than an extremely glib con-artist that he might have seen the potential in that crazy World Wide Web thing that that crazy guy from CERN kept talking about, apparently not though.
Wile E. Quixote
@Tenguphule
Does that make me a bad person?
TenguPhule
No. Hating Spielburg for raping childhood memories is normal.
Luthe
The other problem with solar panels is whether the local zoning laws/HOA rules allow them. Same with trying to install wind turbines on your roof. Though some places are getting with the times and including that sort of thing in the local zoning code.
/urban planner
brokejumper
For what it is worth, I have a family member who works in pediatrics and she swears they had a kid come through with the name Shithead.
alistair
During a heatwave last year, my boss had to run his air conditioner all the time. His house was built in the 20s, and a big expanse of the roof is totally uninsulated. Since we couldn’t insulate it without serious work, we decided to paint the roof white. A few hours of research on IR-reflective roof coatings, a few hundred bucks, and an afternoon of painting, and the upstairs of the house is about 20 degrees cooler. It’s not subtle. There are IR reflective colored roof tiles for people who can’t or won’t deal with the white coatings. It really is a no-brainer.
As for solar, it may make sense in the long run, but the cost of entry is brutal. Battery cost is a non-factor unless you need to be off the grid. It’s easier and much cheaper to get a grid-tied system. Even with subsidies, going solar on our house will cost about $25K. That’s a good chunk of money, even if it pays off down the road.
DBake
For some reason a good number of very good researchers start doing hackwork once they move into writing popular books not aimed at specialists. This might explain Malcolm, Levitt and Dubner.
Even when it’s not hackwork, and in many ways very good, they often play fast and lose with the arguments. An example would be Pinker accusing linguists who disagree with him of being covert racists in The Language Instinct, and actually inventing what seem like new racial stereotypes, so that he can go on to accuse his opponents of believing these stereotypes– that being the only possible explanation of why one might think the grammar or vocabulary of a language affects how native speakers think.
Once free of the constraints of peer review and the possibility of getting slammed by critical colleagues, some of these people just lose their commitment to intellectual rigor. I’m not sure what the solution would be, however. Fighting the mass of disinformation that makes up popular understanding of the world seems a bit like opening fire on the ocean, in hopes of disincentivizing its tendency to smash us with waves.
Little Macayla's Friend
@mclaren:
Not trying to debate solar here, but if you’d like to read the link at comment 22 ( http://www.portlandtribune.com/sustainable/story.php?story_id=125477784816925200 ), you’ll see that batteries aren’t required if you’re on that particular grid. As others have noted, different places have different codes and priorities, but if you have the appropriate electrical panel, a utility co. that thinks green, credits, etc., you can watch your meter run ‘backwards’ for a reasonable cost for supplemental power. Just requires some sockulism.
The regional gov’t. here (more sockulism) is installing wind turbines on an experimental basis. Made locally I believe.
And being trailer trash (no snark), I’ve coated my metal roof white for 18 years and run a window air conditioner about two weeks a year.
Life is different in Little Beirut.
Brachiator
I’m somewhat sympathetic to this since so much traditional economics is largely a waste of time. A few issues back, The Economist had an article asking “What Went Wrong With Economics,”
Subsequently, the magazine was besieged with angry letters from academic economists. How dare they be expected to answer practical questions about the economy when anyone with half a brain must understand that their sophisticated ideas could not be simplistically applied to real world questions.
The Freakonomics Boys have stepped in a pile of crap in writing painfully stupid stuff about climate change. But there has got to be something better than the dismal stuff coming from many traditionalists.
tootiredoftheright
@brokejumper:
My mother was a nurse who worked in a Children’s Hospital for two decades. She remembers a black woman named her child Latrine. My sister is a nurse and remembers a woman named her child Diablo.
Anne Laurie
@Luthe:
A recent episode of Bones actually involved a guy getting beaten to death for dispoiling his gated community with a wind turbine in his front yard. Ah, pop culture, the vox populi! (/snark)
DecidedFenceSitter
As far as Aesthetics are concerned – a friend of mine linked to an article discussing Solars Panels Shaped Like Clay Roof Tiles – so thankfully this is starting to work its way through.
slightly_peeved
with govt. subsidies, it’s about AU$8000 for a 1.5kW system here (US$7100)
Here, it’s getting pretty popular. Solar water heaters have been around for years already, and there are subsidies now to replace old electric heaters with solar water or natural gas heaters. Insulating a non-insulated home is almost entirely subsidised by the government. Local home builders are now pushing environmentally friendly designs, with most of the windows on the north-facing side of the house and eaves to block out the worst of the summer sun. Of course, this is Australia we’re talking about, so replace ‘north’ with ‘south’ for the US. And being Australia, water conservation is an even bigger deal – rainwater tanks are now compulsory on new homes and attract AU$1000 in subsidies on existing homes.
I certainly don’t get the ‘solar panels are ugly’ deal. If anything, it’s trendy at the moment. It’s the house equivalent of driving a Prius.
There’s a reason the movie equivalent of ‘jumping the Shark’ is now ‘nuking the fridge’.