The C Word, Part One
Change (the kind necessary to fix the climate) doesn’t have to be heart-stoppingly awful; or any kind of awful at all, really
Change sits at the heart of political thought. Someone who is called liberal is likely to favor change, experimentation, a free-wheeling approach to society that sometimes consists of thinking “Hey, why not?” and then leaping before looking. (Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was often a case of massive governmental let’s-see-what-happens. When a program didn’t work, they chucked it; when it did, well that’s why we’ve had Social Security ever since.) And someone who is called conservative is likely to believe that meddling with the tried-and-true is a waste of time, a matter of endlessly reinventing the wheel. Pointless change for its own sake. We’ve been down all these roads before, they feel, and our ancestors have already found solutions that work. If it ain’t broke, bug off!
One approach to change is a protean, evolutionary vision of an endless chain of necessary transformations, leading us on a bumpy but ultimately liberating journey toward human achievement. The other approach honors the wisdom of those who came before, steeped in history and reverence for what we have been and still are. Neither approach is inherently wrong or right. Neither approach is necessarily exclusive of the other.
Until the world starts to change around you. Then, as with every other species on the planet, it becomes a simple choice: adapt or die. Change or die. Change, or be changed the hard way.
But in terms of climate adaptation, some of these changes are perhaps easier than you think. I’ve been looking at several of them, and was surprised to find how easy they are, and how much of an impact they can have. Two changes in particular work beautifully together: converting your home to renewable energy, and getting an electric car. Because if your car is emission-free, and the power running your house is emission-free, and you’re charging your car at your house, well then. You’re making a pretty huge difference in saving the world right there.
Over time, I’ll examine these two clean-power options and several others. First up:
Our Wind-Powered Apartment
We live in Santa Monica, a nearly-ideal place for the generation of solar power. But we’re renters, so installing solar panels is not an option. Kind of a shame, but those are our given circumstances. So I had never given much thought to the possibility of converting to renewable energy, until I started receiving some solicitations. I investigated one, it seemed too good to be true so I ignored it, then I heard about it again from some people with the Climate Reality Project. At last I took a serious look. Not long after (a matter of minutes not hours), our apartment had been converted to 100% wind energy.
“Well,” I thought as electricity flowed in its usual fashion. “That was easy.”
Electricity on the grid comes from all sorts of sources: coal, hydro, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, etc. Once it’s on the grid, you can’t tell where it came from, but in California, energy from renewable sources like solar and wind was about 29% of the total mix in 2017. That’s a good number, and thanks to the state legislature and Gov. Brown, that mix is supposed to become 100% by 2040. So I could have just sat back and allowed the state to do the work of conversion for me, slowly. Recent news, though, suggests that we all need to move faster. I wrote about exactly that, last week.
There are a couple different kinds of companies that will allow you to switch over, right now. (I’ll let them explain the technicalities of things like Renewable Energy Credits.) One of them, Drift, does this by automatically switching your provider to one that is 100% renewable. Another, Arcadia Power, lets you keep your current provider but uses the Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) I just mentioned to ensure that an amount of wind power equivalent to your monthly usage gets put on the national grid somewhere. Since you can’t tell where energy came from once it’s on the grid, there’s no way of telling — for us or anyone — how much of what flows into our specific apartment was actually generated by a renewable energy source. But that power exists somewhere, and I’m encouraging its use by participating in the program.
It’s straightforward power-of-the-marketplace thinking: if I choose to spend my money on renewable energy, that’s a vote for those forms of energy. Power companies pay attention to where the money goes. Send a large enough stream of cash in the direction of wind or solar, and you’ll soon see an ever-growing stream of clean energy headed in your direction.
We went with Arcadia. They have two levels of participation: one where your energy is 50% renewable, and costs you nothing extra at all; and another where your energy is 100% renewable, and you pay a little extra. We’re committed to taking action, so we’re paying a little more. Roughly $10 a month. That’s a completely acceptable cost to help save the world.
And now, when we flick on a light switch, everything works exactly as it always has. The light goes on, just as brightly as ever. But the source of that energy is different, and running those lights contributes nothing — nothing — to global warming.
A Local Alternative
Just this morning there was news about the Clean Power Alliance, a local effort in Southern California. They’re not quite set up yet, but when they are, they might be an even better option, precisely because they’re local.
The Alliance is what’s called a Community Choice Aggregation project. What that means is, power made locally for local use. Our current program, Arcadia Power, relies on the national power grid. We’re supporting clean energy, but maybe it’s being generated in Maine and never actually reaches us here. And the reason that’s important can be seen in Puerto Rico. Their entire electric grid got wiped out by Hurricane Maria. If their grid had been supplemented by local sources, a series of mini-grids within the larger one, they’d have been far more resilient and able to absorb shocks like monster hurricanes.
What we’re seeing is that there are already easy, cheap, compelling options that easily convert our apartment and your home to renewable energy. Everything you have still operates exactly as it always has. You may or may not pay a little more, whichever you prefer. It’s an easy choice to make and it has giant repercussions for all of us.
Flick a switch and turn on a light. Nothing more straightforward. But we’re all faced with a choice these days: that light can come from dirty energy, from coal or natural gas or nuclear, or it can come from clean energy. From wind, solar, hydro. Sources that don’t pollute the air, that don’t dump coal ash into rivers, that don’t make you sick, that don’t amplify monster storms every year. And if switching to clean energy is almost as easy as flicking a switch, and is cheap (or free!) to boot, why not do it? Why on earth not?
