It’s Now or Never for Saving Solar Power and Fighting Smog
In case you have noticed lately in Orange County, it is getting smoggier. That doesn’t come from dirty power plants, since they are solar, wind, nuclear, or burning clean natural gas, except for its CO2 greenhouse gases. The smog comes from cars and trucks, and more from large SUVs. California has been the smoggiest state for all of our lives. The only way to cure it is to move to electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, or efficient hybrid vehicles. We will need more clean power in California to charge the electrical vehicles, and our sunshine is ideal for solar power.
While the two Republican beach districts of Dana Rohrabacher and Darrell Issa (retiring) have ocean breezes and the whole Pacific to dissipate smog, it is the inland districts that have the inversion layers and mountains to hold in the smog. This focuses us on Republican Mimi Walters of Irvine and Orange County. She is our only hope to lobby Trump, as well as the other 13 Republicans in Congress from California. Even beach residents work or shop or seek entertainment away from the beach into the smoggy soup.
The courts have ruled that Trump can soon make a decision to scotch importing solar cells by putting a massive tariff (possibly 35%) on importing cheap Chinese solar cells. We must lobby our Congress people, especially Republicans, and they must point out how important solar power is to relieving their smog-inhaling and eye-stinging residents and voters.
In early 2017, we find that there were 260,000 or 374,000 solar workers in 2016, using Solar Foundation or Dept. of Energy data. The DOE data show that this is double the total number of workers in coal, oil, and natural gas, of 187,000. Women are 28% of the solar workforce.
Rooftop solar had 137,000 jobs, while manufacturing had only 38,000 jobs, or about a tenth of total solar workers. California had 100,000, or about 38% of the jobs. Orange County had 3%. In 2015, this amounted to 6,100 workers. Solar protectionism will kill many of these jobs, quite opposite to the promises Trump made to the workers of this nation.
California recognizes the importance of electric vehicles by requiring 2 million Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs) to be manufactured.
Our Representatives have to recognize that it is time to finally cure California of this smog problem, or we should replace them with those who are concerned about our health.
