So who is Jill Stein? The simplest answer would be she is the Green Party Candidate running for President of the United States. Almost nobody in the United Sates knows that.The Green Party is a prominent political movement in Europe because under a parliamentary democracy minority voters across a nation still get representation based on their numbers. In America with its two party system and winner take all elections, third party and independent candidates have not done well.

I have joked in the past that if politics were seen as an industry or form of commerce then somebody should take both the democrat and republican party to court in an anti-trust suit. Jill Stein is not on all the state ballots in this up coming election mostly because in some states laws favor the democrats and republicans, and keep other parties out. Though anti-trust law suits are not popular with conservatives I have found that even among the most hard core laissez-faire capitalists there's a general consensus that coercive monopolies should be broken up. These are monopolies that make it impossible for competitors to enter a market.

Right now it is curious to see how progressive ideas advance in America. Over the last 30 years most new ideas seem to lurch forward in small tentative steps, usually in pilot programs that lack proper funding. So you see things like the city of Stockholm Sweden becoming so efficient in recycling its trash that it now imports garbage to keep its incinerator running. As when the city of Harrisburg PA tries to do something similar it almost bankrupts the municipality and the average household in America still only recycles about 30% and the rest gets sent to a landfill.

In being green I have one idea of my own, though I would not be surprised if other people thought of it first. It's a roof tax. Now how would a roof tax work? It would be simple, every roof would be taxed at so much per square foot. Now nobody likes taxes (unless some else is paying it). Now to be exempt from the tax all you would have to do is install a "green roof" which means you would have to put up solar panels, a wind turbine or have a sod roof. There would be some further exemptions for historical homes and architectural considerations. In short no one would have to pay this tax unless they wanted to.   

People would have a choice to go green or pay the tax. The tax could go to a dedicated fund to help finance other people who want to install a green roof. Already there is a de facto roof tax with large commercial buildings, where new site plans have to make accommodations for water run off. Usually this means landscaping a retention basin on the property. It's a mandated expense to provide a public good so that the contractor can get permission to build.  

This is what one kind of green roof would look like. The big box stores already see the value in making those big flat roofs work for them.

I have read that New York City has over 40,000 acres of flat roofs that are ideal for solar panels. That doesn't mean New York City would be electrically self sufficient but it does mean on a hot summer's day the city wouldn't have import electricity all the way from Upper Quebec. It would also mean that there would be enough excess capacity in the grid that blackouts and brownouts could be a thing of the past.

 
These are some of the leaders in green roofs. If you add up all the kilowatts produced you see that at least one power plant didn't need to be built. I don't know the equation but I would like to know how many tons of coal or cubic feet of natural gas didn't get burned up and how many tons of carbon dioxide didn't go into the atmosphere?

Back to Jill Stein and the Green Party; I think they are the kind of people who would take ideas like this seriously and make them a win-win situation for the average person as well as the environment.

Should Jill Stein be President of the United States? -I don't know -but think more people should at least take interest in the Green Party.