Choking deaths on food in the US

As the cost of solar panels has plummeted, choking deaths on food have risen, a correlation that suggests either that cheap renewable energy makes people eat more recklessly or that two trends can move in opposite directions for seventeen years without sharing a single molecule of causation. The coefficient is -0.911, which is strong enough to make a headline and meaningless enough to make a statistician sigh. The panels get cheaper, the food gets more dangerous, and the chart remains smugly confident in its own irrelevance.

Solar panel costs fell from about $4.00 per watt in 2005 to under $0.30 by 2021, one of the most dramatic cost reductions in the history of energy technology, driven by manufacturing scale in China, improved efficiency, and aggressive policy incentives. Choking deaths rose modestly from about 4,500 to over 5,000, driven by the aging US population. One trend goes down (solar costs), the other goes up (choking deaths), and the negative correlation is mathematically inevitable when two monotonic trends move in opposite directions across the same timeline. The sun does not affect the esophagus. The panel does not affect the meal.

Seventeen years of solar panels getting cheaper and choking deaths increasing is a masterclass in the production of meaningless statistics. Both trends are real, both are important in their own domains, and neither has the slightest relevance to the other. The cost curves fall, the demographic curves rise, and the correlation between them is nothing more than two lines crossing on a chart that measures time, not truth.