Oil spills are heart-wrenching anywhere, here at home on our own Pacific coast hits me the hardest. I feel these accidents are the result of our collective laziness and a few people’s greed. We can do so much better.
Workers in protective suits clean the contaminated beach after an oil spill in Newport Beach, California, on Wednesday, October 6, 2021.
This sad situation brings several larger issues to mind for me; things I don’t understand well, but I feel they are all related.
– Our country is going further into debt each year, (blowing through the 100% debt to GDP ratio during the Trump administration, and reaching about 125% for 2020.)
– We are essentially borrowing money from China at this point, to subsidize the oil industry and our gasoline-based import consumer culture.
– Our oil based consumer import economy is decreasing American manufacturing jobs, and harming our ability to provide for ourselves.
– The drilling, refining and burning of oil and gas is causing horrendous damage to oceans, wetlands and wildlife here at home, and globally altering the atmospheric chemistry in a dangerous manner.
– There is a finite amount of oil, which is a base ingredient for mountains of plastic junk in addition to incredibly useful items like contact lenses and bike helmets that plastic is great for, where a small amount of plastic makes products that make our lives much better. However we take that oil and we waste nearly all of it by burning it.
I know these issues can not be remedied by installing solar panels on roofs here on the Olympic Peninsula, but I am stumped as for a better thing for me to be doing at the moment.
Please do what you can to help address these complex issues, which may include riding a bike or driving an EV, buying less unnecessary stuff, or maybe even installing a solar array on your roof.
5.25 KW Sunpower Array, Nordland, September 2021
Love our Solar roof! [Our kids in Seattle are now going solar!!!} Love my LEAF [Thanks Jeff Randall!] and my husband’s hybrid. How are the storage batteries coming?
Hi Kathy, thank you for the kind words, I love my Leaf also, and that’s great that your kids can install solar on their home. Batteries are less expensive then they used to be, and there are now more “off the shelf” solutions from solid manufacturers that we are comfortable offering. They are still not inexpensive, so I’ll send you an email to begin a conversation about what you would like to back up, and what a battery system might be able to do. In the meanwhile, do you have an emergency back-up generator?