Who's Best for Earth? That Would Be Me.

I was amazed at how quickly we'd gone from crunchy-granola folk weeping about polar bears to prickly investors obsessed with outlay recouping. Someone else had heard that solar technology was actually pretty cheap, but that solar prices were being kept artificially high by a government in bed with greedy corporate conglomerates like GE. "Didn't you see the documentary 'Who Killed the Electric Car?' " wailed my friend Sharon. (Answer: the government.) "It's like the electric car!"

"Why is everything like the electric car?" I stabbed back (for some reason, the electric car always fills me with the same vague boggy gloom I feel when I hear the words "Ralph Nader"). "Why is everything always a government plot?" Sharon is what I call not just a blue but an indigo Democrat: She believes that, in spite of an enlightened spirit's true intentions, we live in Bush Nation and hence are helpless in the throes of a vast, faceless, crushing bureaucratic force -- sort of like the Borg. Whereas I believe that, with the exception of the whole Cheney/Halliburton/Iraq oil thing, the government mostly shambles forward like a great chained bear with arrows in its side, meting out along the way, like Mother Nature herself, some harm, some good -- no functioning health-care system, fluoride in the water and then, happily, free vaccinations.

But then came the final blow -- the graphic designer in steel-rimmed glasses who murmured disparagingly: "The problem with solar panels is they're ugly. They make your roof look like a warehouse! We could never get our architect to sign off on it."

Well! This was my Al Gore-standing-on-a-dune-in-his-shirtsleeves-moment. I suddenly realized that solar energy is a metaphor . . . for me. Solar power is me: hardworking, unpopular, maligned, misunderstood. It was now I who heard the call to step into my own metaphorical minivan with my own lonely PowerPoint, leading my kin to become that most irritating of tribes: the solar-powered Los Angeles public-school family (public education being another of the windmills I tilt at).

All right. So, several engineering consults later, it turns out that even with the propitious orientation of our house's roof and many (yes!) government rebates, going full solar will cost us not $10K but more like $40K. So we're slated to "recoup" not in 10 years, but more like 20. What with the roofing, the tree-topping and the new power plate, going solar has much of the inconvenience of remodeling but with no shining new kitchen island at the end of it all. So, we are remaining in our small 1927 bungalow and planning to spend a ton of money to consume even less electricity so that we can move toward an ever tinier eco-footprint -- made by a kind of worn, stinky, unfashionable Earth shoe. Meanwhile, no one will cede the higher moral eco-ground to us, ever. Sniped a scientist friend of mine: "Instead of solar, why don't you spend the money on something less self-aggrandizing -- like offering $50 to anyone with an old refrigerator?"

And yet there is the exquisite pleasure of eco-stalking those who used to eco-stalk you. "Good news!" I now enthuse to formerly smug Prius-driving friends of mine. "Right this second, a SolarCity engineer and I are studying a live Google Earth picture of your house! Little shade, south-facing -- how 'bout I send them over for an estimate?"

This shuts them up. And that, finally, is enough.

Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer and radio commentator whose most recent book, "Mother on Fire," will be published in August.