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| Home Solar |
 Title text: "While I try to do my part to destroy the environment, I try not to focus too much on individual responsibility. By pushing for broad policy changes, we can collectively do far more damage to the biosphere than any of us could on our own." |
Explanation
Black Hat and Cueball are outside Black Hat's house discussing the solar panels he has recently installed on the roof. (Or alternatively outside another house, e.g. Cueball's, with its solar panels having initiated the comparison.) Being a classhole, Black Hat is attempting to live in a way that will maximize his negative impact on the environment. Cueball asks why he has installed solar panels, since he knows Black Hat, and that he has described himself as anti-'renewables'. Black Hat responds that, as much as he'd prefer an option that harmed the planet more, solar power (photovoltaics and/or solar thermal energy) is simply the cheapest option and his budget is incapable of supporting anything else.
Black Hat's words in panel 3, that "the technology just isn't there and the cost is too high", is an oft-repeated excuse for those sticking with fossil fuel use rather than potentially deploy renewable energy technology, such as solar panels. When solar panel technologies were in their infancy, their costs were very high, pricing out most uses of them; but now solar panels are mass-produced, together with some potential periods of official subsidy (with varying likelihood, by both location and time) as the manufacturing/installation industries were encouraged to be more developed, and it has become more affordable for households to put solar panels on their rooftops, so the excuse has lost much of its validity. Nowadays this excuse is commonly used to justify technological inertia.
This may also be reference to the high oil/gasoline prices recently, going up over 30% in the past two weeks prior to this comic's publication, overwhelingly due to military activity disrupting fuel (and other) trading, and its knock-on effects globally.
In the end, Black Hat claims that he can try to 'make up for this' by using the saved money to buy industrial waste and burn it in his backyard. Cueball responds with a knowing comment about 'carbon onsets'. This is a play on carbon offsets: certificates used for demonstrating mitigation of one's own carbon footprint, by effectively crowd-funding larger projects that are 'carbon negative' but are difficult to properly coordinate directly and individually. Carbon offsets represent emission reductions or captures happening elsewhere, and can be used to offset emissions caused by the user of the credit. This is rather than just relying upon random altruistic third parties to put the effort and finance into such a scheme to counteract others' care-free carbon emissions, or to allow a way to reward those who would indeed just do this off their own back.
Black Hat does the reverse, causing extra environmental harm to offset (or "onset", as Cueball calls it) the good reluctantly done by him by using solar panels instead of an oil furnace. This doesn't really make sense since it's not clear what target he would be trying to 'onset' to; there is no 'ideal' level of emissions that he would be trying to achieve, although one can assume that he'll be aiming to be at least the wrong side of 'carbon neutral'. While the solar panels will have a much lower carbon footprint than the oil furnace, they will still have had some, in manufacture, and other options (such as burning coal) could provide him with even more emissions than the oil.
The title text is a spin on a standard argument about personal responsibility in tackling environmental issues, distorted through the perspective of Black Hat. Low amounts of action to address personal impact is sometimes excused by pointing out that it will be a 'drop in the ocean' relative to the scale of the problem, and suggesting that only action at a global institutional level can really address it. Black Hat believes (correctly) that policy and other systemic change can cause bigger damage than just him burning industrial waste, and is excited about the potential for this to change things for the worse. This is ironic, because ingrained institutional and systemic factors have played a significant role in causing the problems we now have, and holding up the finding of solutions to them.
Transcript
- [Black Hat and Cueball stand next to a house with solar panels on the roof.]
- Cueball: Wait, you got solar panels?
- Cueball: I thought you were against renewables.
- [Zoom to show only Cueball and Black Hat.]
- Black Hat: Oh, definitely. I hate the environment and want to harm it as much as possible.
- Black Hat: I'd love to have an oil furnace.
- [Zoom in on Black Hat; only his head and shoulders are visible.]
- Black Hat: But the technology just isn't there and the cost is too high.
- Black Hat: I despise solar, but it makes more financial sense in my situation.
- [Zoom out to show Cueball and Black Hat again.]
- Black Hat: But with the money I'm saving, I can buy and burn industrial waste in my yard to try to make up for it.
- Cueball: Ah, yeah, carbon onsets.
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