A Modest Proposal on Earth Day

My friend Tom, also known as Tom The Collector of Everything, is a collector of people as well as objects. You never know who might meet at one of his parties. Not that the guests are celebrities but you'll find a wide range of backgrounds and opinions. One person who I didn't directly know but knew through a network of mutual acquaintances openly declared that global warming or climate change was hoax.

Now he wasn't all angry rhetoric and bumper wisdom, he brought up several good points. Though these points where from a minority science and research community; and a few were based on very weak or misinterpreted information, he still stuck to his guns. He didn't expect that I had any knowledge on the subject or that push back with countering facts and studies that could be found in professional journals or online.

In the end we agreed to disagree. I left him with one parting thought, "that the Earth's check engine light is on, don't you think we should at least stop what we're doing and see if there really is a problem".  That analogy struck home with him because I knew he just finished building a 500 plus horsepower hot rod / project car. He always wanted a car like this since he was 16 and twenty years later he finally got it. The idea of $10 a gallon gasoline, further pollution controls and additional regulations just totally irritated this guy who is honest, hard working and felt he earned the car of his dreams.

One of the failures of modern environmental movement is the feeling that to be environmentally conscious is to trade down to a "lesser" lifestyle. It's all about sacrifice and rarely about personal benefits.

Pollution is generally is in a way to off load some of the costs of making a product. In economy class you have the widget, a manufacturer of widgets might want to expand his market and discourage competition by lowering the price of his product by 10%. So not to eat into profits it makes economical sense to just dump the waste. The benefit is everybody gets cheaper widgets as profits go up.

Unfortunately if you live close to the widget factory and it's your land, water and air that gets polluted -then that's not so good. The people close to the factory bear the cost of making a cheaper widget. Their health could be compromised, their property could decrease in value , their homes could be made unlivable.       

With soon to be nine billion people there really aren't any places left where a factory can pollute without effecting a large population of people.

Factories can pollute in big and obvious ways but we all pollute in small but dramatically huge ways when added up cumulatively.  Something as simple as the roof over our heads has big environmental consequences. The rain that runs off our roofs helps flood local rivers and in more developed areas does not get as much of a chance to soak into the ground.

Most every roof is an example of wasted potential.  The New York Times printed an article on June 16th 2011 on a study and survey done in New York City.  From the air the roofs of the city were mapped. They discovered there where tens of thousands of acres of flat and low pitched roofs suitable for solar panels. If these roofs had solar panels 49% of the city's peak demand for electricity could be met. That means on the hottest summer days when every air conditioner was on, half of that electricity could be produced in the city and not have to come from a power grid that extents all the way to northern Quebec. It also means that the electrical supply would be more reliable with a larger margin of excess supply.  The possibility of brown outs and black outs could be eliminated.   

New York City is a special case because the price electricity is about double the national average. It would make immediate economic sense to do it and do it now.

The energy industry, particularly those companies producing fossil fuels dread ideas like this. As one bit of trivia, the very first day Ronald Reagan was in office he issued an executive order to remove the solar panels off the top of the White House.

Once I spoke an engineer who was planning to build for himself an "electric garage". It would have 1,000 square feet of solar panels on the roof, a power converter, charger and batteries to be used to charge up his plug-in hybrid car. He estimated that he could do 90% of his driving on solar power without buying gasoline. Over eight years the garage should pay for itself, even if the price of gasoline does not go up. Oh another bit of trivia, GM owns a 30% share of Toyota and GM blocked Toyota from offering a factory installed plug-in option on their hybrid cars sold in America, though it was a very popular option in Japan right from the beginning. 

While we are talking about trivia Germany and Denmark are the world's leaders in solar power. Both countries are not known for their sunny weather above the 50 parallel of north latitude. One reason they produce so much of their electricity with solar and wind energy is government leadership. By law the utility companies have to pay for the excess energy a homeowner puts back into the power grid -just like here in America. The big difference in Germany is the utilities have to pay a price that's very close to the retail price per kilowatt. In the United States the utility companies only have to pay the wholesale price. You can see the average person in Germany has real economic incentive to go green.

For this Earth Day I'd like to make a modest proposal -a roof tax.  It would be a tax on every square foot of roof space. I know "tax" is such a dirty word but it doesn't have to be. Because just about everybody can make themselves exempt from this tax by having a "green roof". 

1. You can install sod roof or have a water collection system that goes to cistern for the slow release of rain water.

A green roof can go any where in the country or the city.

2. You can install solar panels on part of the roof and as long as you produce an minimum of 2 watts per square foot average over the entire roof.

New solar shingles can covert sun light into electricity without changing the look of your home

3. Or you can install a wind turbine on the roof or on the property, again with same minimum of 2 watts per square foot average.

If the tax was announced today you would have five years to install one of these three options or even a combination of these three.  

This might sound to some like Hippy-Dippy tree hugging nonsense but Wal-Mart, that company not really known as a champion of the environment, is already installing solar panels on the big flat roofs of their stores. The roofs of their stores and warehouses already produce 50 megawatts of electricity.  That's one less power plant that needs to built.

 A tax like this might not benefit or be loved by big oil and gas but it will make money for others and maybe just make things a little better here on Earth.