Editor,
Daily, weekly, even hourly we are treated to news reports on the dire consequences and enormous costs of global warming. Rising sea levels and catastrophic wildfires have caused and will continue to cause unimaginable personal and societal harm.
Gov. Newsom’s budget includes more than $1 billion for climate related mitigation and the Biden Administration just announced $50 billion to combat climate exacerbated catastrophic wildfires. Meanwhile, the United States’ dependence on fossil fuels, will derail the 2030 climate goals unless major new policies are enacted to speed up the transition to clean energy – including solar. There can be no doubt about the urgent need to do better, faster.
Yet, in a Jan. 17 New York Times guest essay, (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/17/opinion/schwarzenegger-solar-power-california.html?searchResultPosition=2) former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger showed how the state is about to take a big step backward by acquiescing to the investor-owned energy utilities and making it too costly for many residents to adopt solar power.
Tax residential rooftop solar? No! Tax carbon pollution instead. A policy called “carbon fee and dividend” would institute a tax on the extraction of fossil fuels with the fees returned to individual households. It would accelerate energy innovation and reduce our dependence on carbon-spewing fossil fuels.
Cynthia Sandoval
Broadmoor Village
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(1) comment
The fundamental problem with roof top solar is it’s far too expensive. It’s far cheaper to buy 100% solar through PG&E than build you own. Also like any other electronics device, the cost of a roof top solar system will be 50% less for twice solar energy in 5 years. The money put into a roof top solar system could be used to add 100 times the amount of solar cells to an existing solar farms. Transmission cost are insignificant and the transmission lines from solar farms don’t run through forests to get here. When the sun shines here it’s shining even brighter in the valley. When this happens PG&E has to give solar electricity away to Arizona and Nevada to balance the grid. Obviously PG&E doesn’t need any more power from roof top solar systems.
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