Of a Universal Solar Belt Solution - Sustainable Change That Energizes (Almost) Everyone…

By Laura Mauney

I currently live in Los Angeles, one of the most populated urban communities in the world, and a potential source of massive rooftop solar real estate.

Yet, rarely do I see solar installed on the roof of any given home, business, school or other public facility.

Purely, simply, obviously, and easier to implement than we think, sun-belt households, whom I’ll call solar-belt households, should be using photovoltaics to generate and sell power to local utilities across the nation.

Local utilities, for their part, should be proactively soliciting residents in their communities for solar real estate for this very purpose; no, not "requiring by law" solar panels on every home, but contracting with local households to use rooftops to generate solar power - and - whether by direct or subcontracted, services, providing solar equipment, installation, wiring and maintenance at no charge, or perhaps in exchange for a nominal monthly fee to the owner, say $20 per month per household.

Beyond the profound patriotic aspect of a solar-belt solution, this particular answer to our nation's energy problems would engender benefits far beyond nearly-free sun-power for said households:

1. The complicated process of identifying and approving precious wilderness land for solar farms would be eliminated.
2. Our energy grid would be less dependent on centralized installation sites for power generation. Rather, generation would be spread far and wide across the very regions being served. If one segment of this massive solar community has a cloudy day, or suffers a disaster of some sort, other segments could easily pick up the slack (as long as the regional grids remain connected).
3. Sustained power loss at individual homes during disasters in the solar-belt would be virtually eliminated because each homeowner would be dependent on his/her own power generator.
4. Rollout of electric cars could be sped up, and become more realistic from an energy-usage perspective, since households would be in a position to generate their own electric power for their own electric vehicles.
5. Most significantly, even though a solar-belt solution might not provide enough energy to serve all energy needs 24/7/365, especially during rainy periods and harsh northern winters, a solar-belt solution would remove a significant portion of the energy burden from the volatile, polluting power resources: oil, coal, nuclear, gas, not only slowing down our gluttonous over-use of such resources, but giving the related industries and dependents the breathing room they need to facilitate a smooth transition to other, more sustainable energy production.

In my view, solar rollout should be treated the same as plumbing and electricity rollout, road paving, mass transit and phone line rollout were treated in the 20th century, as something close to being a natural right for all the people.

The solution is fairly simple:

• Continue to provide incentives for new solar businesses, and to educate new installers and engineers.
• Aggressively educate and inform the public about the tax incentives, long term benefits and ease of access to solar installation, similar to the way the public was educated about seat belts back in the day.
• Continue to tear down in communities nationwide public policies and municipal codes that have inhibited solar rollout in the past.

The USA can definitely afford a solar-belt solution, and it can be easily pulled off, if the same level of energy and ingenuity is applied as the amount elected officials put into election year campaigning, or strategizing a war, or developing any given piece of legislation.

If event producers can pull off a Superbowl and scientists can send us to the moon, then surely there is enough talent and organizational sensibility on hand to implement a solar-belt solution.

The beauty of the end-game would be (beyond a lot of new jobs and manufacturing opportunities in the short term): once done, a solar-belt solution will be done, ideally for as long as the sun shines in the sky.

Originally published March 21, 2011.

Making Change: How I Trained Myself to Remember to Use the Reusable Shopping Bags

- by Laura M Mauney

(In celebration of the Los Angeles City Council ban on plastic shopping bags, I decided to update this article, which I originally blogged on my Blogger blog in July, 2010, in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico BP deep-water oil well disaster).

Around 2006, I finally got fed up with the massive stockpile of plastic and paper shopping bags I had stuffed - or rather jammed - into one of my lower kitchen cabinets.

Fire hazard doesn't even begin to define the problem.

As the child of depression era parents, and the grandchild of a grandmother who saved and reused all manner of store-bought packaging, I had trouble with the idea of just throwing all those bags away.

As an environmentalist, the guilt I felt accepting the bags at all was also gnawing at my soul, and had been for years.

Paper bags require trees and cutting trees depletes the planet's oxygen supply.

Plastic bags, even worse, are made of petroleum - you know - the dinosaur goo that just ruined our beloved Gulf of Mexico after an oil well blew up.

Discarded plastic bags, just as bad, have piled up during the past three decades to the point where there are continent sized islands of them clustered out in the middle of our oceans. Fish eat the bits of plastic that break off into the water, and die... so on and so forth... you get the continent-sized ugly picture.

And besides, in my kitchen, I was running out of paper-and-plastic-bag-storage space.

So, finally, one day, I broke ranks with the cheap-side of my genetic makeup, and purchased five, $1 reusable shopping bags during my next grocery shop for the family.

I felt great - I'd CHANGED for the better, finally; so I thought.

But of course, the very next time I went to the market, though I'd been careful to take the reusable bags to my car, and store them in the hatchback part of my little, fuel-efficient hatchback, I forgot to carry the reusable bags into the store.

I did not realize my mistake until checkout, so I begged the clerk to let me run to the car to get the bags. He did, but the situation was awkward because it caused a checkout traffic jam, which nobody appreciates, including me.

The very next time after that, and again and again, the same exact scenario transpired: I forgot the bags and had to beg the clerk for a reprieve while I ran to the car to get them at checkout.

Sometimes, my teenaged daughter would be with me at the store, so I'd send her out, running, to get the bags from the car.

AAARRRGH! Why was it so hard for me to remember the resuable bags? Obviously, there was a big difference between "wanting change" and actually "changing."

Finally, fed up with my spoiled by the plastic bag forgetfulness, I decided to exploit my cheap-side, meanly.

Next time I went shopping and forgot the bags, I simply bought new bags, five, for $5.00.

I repeated this punishment for a couple of months - really - a couple of months - until I'd amassed about thirty reusable shopping bags in the back of my hatchback.

And then, at last, the great day came. I pulled into the parking lot at the grocery store; got out and locked the doors; went around to the hatch; unlocked it and lifted it open; grabbed about six of the 30 bags, and went into the store.

Yay! I had finally accomplished REAL change, that I could believe in, for a whopping $30 or so.

I felt good about myself, and moreover, as I walked into that store, I felt really super-cool; way ahead of the pack; like the first kid on the block; like a real maverick: this latter set of high self-esteem descriptors is quite an accomplishment for a middle aged mom.

Six years have gone by since I forced myself to discard my wasteful habit of accepting paper or plastic at the checkout counter. I view the number of bags I haven't used the way Scrooge McDuck views his gold coins; kind of a mutation of my cheap-side:

How many plastic bags have I now NEVER taken in the past six years? I figure the number is around 3,000. That amounts to 100 bags not wasted for every $1 I spent on a reusable bag.

Word on the street is that Angelenos are handed over 1 billion plastic bags per year while shopping, and that the city spends millions per year cleaning up the litter of those carelessly discarded.