Subject: Re: Tariff exemptions
Solar panels also suddenly, randomly showed up on today's list of exemptions, for now.

I bring it up because at just about the same time the exemptions were posted this morning, I was out back with an assistant planting some native species along the creek bank*. I gestured towards the solar array on the shop across the field and mentioned to him that I'd finally had a guy come out last week to discuss increasing the number of panels.

I said I had scheduled the meeting a couple of weeks ago, before any of this tariff nonsense, and as of this morning I suspected my response to the bid was going to hinge on whether I receive a pre-tariff quote or a post-tariff quote - and thus I was going to be a microcosm of the American economy this season.

(The pre-tariff bid will I think pencil out to a break-even of around a decade after factoring in the time value of money, the rate of rise of the cost per kwh over the last few years, anticipated consumer inflation, risk-free returns...but a post-tariff bid will probably be a nonstarter from a fiscal point of view <not to mention the unwillingness to fling thousands of dollars pointlessly into Lake Orange>)

Anyhow, it suddenly looks like the solar panel rep will still have a job next season, as I'll probably place the order.

Unless things change, I mean.

-- sutton

*riparian restoration. Blackberries are a noxious weed here, and I let them get out of control during the lock-down years. So, last fall we spent $$$ for a crew of laborers to pull them out of the riparian zone and pile them into a burn pile. We spent the winter digging out the ugliest of the crowns, and I'll be back there with a string trimmer on a regular basis all through the next 2-3 growing seasons.

Meanwhile, I bought a truckload of native plants in one-gallon buckets, and that's what we planted and caged today (while lighting off the now-dried burn piles at the same time). Salmon spawn in the creek each fall, and blackberry overgrowth leads to elevated water temps by crowding out the canopy-formers.

It occurred to me - now over a hundred man-hours and a few thousand dollars into the whole project - what a futile gesture it was. Two banks to the creek, forty miles dam to mouth, probably 2/3 of the creek flowing through private lands where very few landowners will address the blackberry issue and/or let their cattle trample the whole riparian zone into barren mud. My few hundred yards of creek bank are a rounding error by any measure - the same as can fairly be said for my abandoning of commercial flight under non-emergent circumstances, recycling everything recyclable, the purchase of a used EV (and used books), and carefully mowing around the milkweed.

But under any meaningful scale of space and time, every bloody thing we do can be made futile.

So as the man said, I got back to doing what I can, where I can, what I can.

(I'm pretty sick of those gd blackberry crowns, however.)