Whale oil and solar panels both being signs of high status.

I still don’t understand.

In actual history whale oil made airplane engines go (as lubricants) until the 1970s when they switched to synthetic.

Most whales were killed in the 20th century to make planes go, not in the 19th to make city lights burn.

	▲	lifeisstillgood a day ago \| parent [-]
		TIL - yeah the 20C saw millions killed vs 19C and hundreds of thousands. I mean obviously that was industrialisation. Seems to be mostly meat, fats for cooking and a fair amount of TNT production - as well as lubricants for planes … But in 1986 the whaling moratorium came in, and numbers killed have been hundreds or few thousand since. Yay Star Trek

▲

Barrin92 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I assume that perspective applies only to West Germans (which btw I happen to be and it's nonsense here too), but Pakistan[1] didn't replace one third of their energy supply in the last few years because they're such yuppies, photovoltaic literally saved them from their energy grid breaking down.

Solar energy isn't a fashion statement, it's rapidly and cheaply getting energy to billions of people who need it the most.

[1]https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pakistan-solar-bo...

▲

yannyu a day ago | parent | next [-]

It's so bizarre to think that harvesting free energy from the sun could be considered a political or status position. Is it not logically obvious that harvesting as much free energy as possible is the strategically stronger position? Why would you not want to do that?

	▲	zrail 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's effectively spelled out in the article. The wealth of the last century has been fueled in large part by fossil fuels and it takes an embarrassingly small fraction of that wealth to convince the populace that the competition (I.e. renewables) is a status symbol.

▲

shantara a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s not only economically advantageous, but also increases the grid resilience. In times of war and conflict large power plants and their accompanying high voltage transmission lines and banks of transformers become an easy target. Adding more local decentralized power production solves the problem.