The celebrity epicenter of this country continues to be LA. I've been to LA once or twice before and have a vivid memory of the freeways as a sea of concrete nicely landscaped on its perimeter. I was impressed with how bilingual it was; everything was given the female gender Spanish article LA, as in LA community College, and LA Spa. If this sounds like someone who just came down from the volcano, it is!
That was then and now is now. I just took my family to LA. I wanted my teenagers to see for themselves what they read in magazines and see in the movies. The weather was magnificent, I just would have liked to see the hills through all the smog. The ocean was a deep emerald green and the beach of white fine sand. Venice beach was crazy, and the man wearing only a glue-on leopard skin genital pouch bathing suit as he shopped along the boardwalk didn't help contradict that impression.
I looked hard for signs of advanced thinking about the environment, it is California after all, but other than solar panels integrally designed into the overhangs of the Staples Center, and dotting the otherwise desolate concrete slab of the blocks and blocks of parking, I didn't get the impression that it's that ahead in the environmental arena. Moreover, the gasoline consumption to move around that gigantic city and its wretched traffic was painfully apparent. An hour's drive will take you to meet your friend, 45 minutes will get you to Rodeo Drive.
I visited my fellow Rice alumna and friend Priscilla and her husband Peter while in LA. Priscilla is the nicest Texan in LA, with the coolest job at the JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab of Cal Tech) as mission control expert. My kids were impressed by her kind and genuinely friendly nature, and humble about her brains. Peter, a physicist by training, is using his brains to further the solar power cause. So- serving as his sous chef and making the red wine sauce for the fresh mahi mahi that he and Priscilla had just caught off the coast of Mexico two days before- I grilled him.
In a nutshell, the state of solar power in the United States is that unless the city, county or state buys into the program by establishing rebates for installation of solar cells, the buy-in price continues to be exorbitantly high. I equate this to health insurance companies who don't pay for preventive treatments. Every house that takes care of at least a portion of its energy consumption through solar power means less pressure on the grid, on the states to build more power plants to supply our demand, resulting in less pollution.
In a nutshell, we need to start weaning ourselves from the grid, but the entry point for those of us in areas that haven't matured environmentally remains too high. Austin, you're looking cool.
