"Granted, most American homes aren’t heated with fire any more, so we don’t have a directly personal a relationship with flame..."

That's wrong. Electricity is used to heat only 37% of American homes, primarily with heat pumps, and 48% use natural gas which has a flame whether it is a forced draft system or has a boiler for steam heat. 14% use other sources which is either heating oil, propane, wood, or our old friend coal, and they all produce a flame. Does anyone sit in their basement to watch their furnace? No, they watch a television in the living room.

My city of Pittsburgh has 306 cloudy days a year, and it snows in the winter, so solar power is kind of pointless. We used to think that the omnipresent clouds were caused by pollution fron the steel mills, but they went away and the clouds stayed.