By Sandra Tsing Loh
Sunday, April 20, 2008
LOS ANGELES Why oh why is this city not the solar energy capital of the world? Why?
This is but one of the many abstruse philosophical questions that torment me now that I am 46, perimenopausal and prone to lying awake at 2 a.m., mentally Google-Earthing, Google-Earthing, Google-Earthing. Deep into the night, while others are sleeping, I -- a college graduate, a Democrat and a Californian, that classic trifecta of eco-angst -- ponder the sprawl, the snarl, the smog. . . .
And when I zoom in on the middle of it, the ghostly cross hairs ratcheting down, there is my home town of Los Angeles: green-celebrity-filled, teeming with affluence and punishingly sunny. So sunny that last summer's Southern California heat wave triggered widespread power outages. Stifling 90-degree nights blew our family of four apart into a Jonestown-esque mandala, each body seeking rest in a different part of the house, all of us stripped to our underwear, clutching spray bottles, hugging wet pillows, every window flung wide.
Which got me to thinking (picture me waving my arms in emphatic semaphore): Why don't we do a cosmic jujitsu. . . and use the sun. . . to make the power. . . to run our air conditioning? Do you get my drift? Do you follow me? I think you do. The sun!
I felt as though I'd lit on the most California Natural solution of all. Let my Prius-driving, edamame-snapping colleagues top this. Which I knew they'd probably try to do. Because ultimately, what each individual decides "going green" is, is as shape-shifting and American as Melville's great white whale. The green movement holds a recycled-glass mirror up to the soul. And we all see a different reflection.
It's true that our style of California eco-dreamin' can seem simple, one-liney, almost Zen. Ed Begley Jr.'s eco-koan, from his book "Living Like Ed," is: "I believe we need to live simply so that others can simply live." But going green is something you feel the truth of, in your heart. You have to. Put the brain in charge, and soon you'll be kneeling paralyzed by indecision, like Hamlet with Yorick's skull. Particularly when you consider what the lowest eco-footprint societies all have in common: (1) high poverty, (2) high infant mortality and (3) short life expectancy. Forget living simply, we shouldn't be living at all!
Think too much about living simply, and you may begin to live very complexly, engineering your own personal Third World country, possibly in Vermont (a hotbed of sinewy eco-bachelors fond of tinkering with things like batteries powered by their own pee). Vermont naturalist Richard Czaplinski boasts that he has an "ecological footprint the size of a hare." He lives on his own private Walden with a funky cabin, scythes, fuel-sipping lamps, old VW license-plate lights and, of course, diligent composting that supposedly produces a cubic yard of poo a year.
Reformed weapons designer and "Radical Simplicity" author Jim Merkel urges us to ask further: "Does my employment . . . restore the earth, further damage the earth, or is it neutral?" And what about the act of making money itself? After leaving his job, Merkel made his new goal setting his income "below a taxable level. Then not a single cent of mine would rain bombs and bullets onto peasants who live near coveted resources." Of course, some taxes go toward bridges, schools and libraries but . . . eh, once again, too much eco-thinking. Headache coming on.
Which is why what came to me in the middle of that fateful night was . . . solar! Simple, natural, plentiful, not creepy!
And the timing of my eco-vision was perfect: After seeing "An Inconvenient Truth," friends of mine had announced that they felt moved to act immediately, to start a monthly salon where we could discuss what we all could do to stop global warming. (In my L.A., all socializing has a purpose: sample new Thai marinade, test-drive teak gazebo, make plan to stop global warming.)
And so, jabbing pita chips into hummus, seven of us began a game of eco-one-upmanship involving incandescent bulbs, hemp clothing and madly conflicting theories about water use. I stabbed at my colleagues with my larger, I thought, pita chip: "Why not solar? Let's all go solar!"
So okay. The first rebuttal was that, even in 2008, it's too expensive, although "expensive" is relative. Never mind Angelina Jolie and her private jets; Los Angeles is a city where even non-celebrities drop $300,000 on remodeling a house, $40,000 a year to send the twins to private school (and that's kindergarten) and $5,000 a year on "hair" (roots, highlights, color, straightening). By comparison, converting our homes to solar would cost . . . $10,000? $80,000? "Even with rebates," groused Paul, an engineer, "it could take you 10 years to recoup!"
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.
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