If you’ve followed The Adventures of the Solagnelist thus far you know that I am seriously jonesing to generate all my electricity from my own rooftop solar power. The only thing stopping me – an even more serious lack of the do-ray-mi.
As the late great Woody Guthrie put it,
Woody wasn’t kidding and neither am I. And just like Woody, I’d like to sing you a song about a better way…
In a deal brokered by the city’s newly commissioned Citizens Environmental Task Force, Exxon/Mobil, owners of the Exxon/Mobil Refinery in the City of Torrance agreed today to fund a bond that will make low cost financing of solar energy systems for home and apartment owners. The loans for solar power, authorized under California’s AB 811, are added as assessments to a homeowner’s property tax bills and are passed on to the new owner if a home is sold.“We are so cash rich at the moment that we’re spending money all over the place while everyone else is forced to cut back. We know carbon taxes are coming and we won’t always be floating in a sea of profits we made at your expense. So it seemed only logical that we give a little back to a community we’ve released an awful lot of carbon in. Hell, that entire property our refinery’s on will probably be a superfund site after they force us to stop producing our fossil fuels.“
Continue reading ➞ Exxon/Mobil To Fund Solar Financing Bond For Torrance Homeowners
I spent another two and a half hours last night (time, like my 401k I’ll never get back) in the always delightful West Wing Commission Room attending the monthly Torrance Environmental Quality and Energy Saving Commission meeting.
My friends, let me tell you right now that we’ve got trouble.
Oh we got trouble,
Right here in Torrance!
With a capital “T”
That rhymes with “C”
And that stands for Clueless…
Come on, sing along with me after the jump –
Continue reading ➞ Torrance Enviro Commish – From Curious to CringeWorthy
The more time I spend with Lillian Light the more I admire, respect and flat out like her.
Our relationship started about a month ago when we spent an evening together carpooling to a UCLA workshop on communication climate change that we both participated in.
I wrote about our experience at the time in Greenius On The Green Scene The South Bay Report.
I dug Lillian right away. She speaks her mind, she knows what she’s talking about and she does more than just talk, she walks the environmental walk. Lillian is the real deal and a rare commodity in this world – authentic and genuine without the slightest hint of pretense or self-importance.
Lillian is also the President of the Environmental Priorities Network (EPN) and I wanted to learn more about them and more about Lillian herself. When I asked her if she’d agree to be interviewed for Creative Greenius she graciously agreed.
I attended the first 2009 meeting of the Torrance Environmental Quality and Energy Conservation Commission last Thursday night and it was curiously different from anything I expected.
First of all, I was the only member of the public who attended the meeting. Secondly, the energy level, enthusiasm and sense of urgency I’ve experienced at other environmental meetings was nowhere to be found among the Commissioners. Maybe they all wished they were watching the Lakers-Celtics game that night instead…
Your Greenius already knew the Lakers would beat down Boston, so my focus was fixed on what was going down in the room.
Continue reading ➞ The Curious Case of the Torrance Enivornmental Commission
The South Bay region I live and work in covers an area of 161 square miles and encompasses 15 cities plus portions of the City of Los Angeles and unincorporated portions of the County of Los Angeles.
The South Bay is defined by the LAX Airport to the north and the Port of Los Angeles to the south – two of the biggest polluters in Southern California.
Cities that make up the South Bay include: Carson, El Segundo, Gardena, Hawthorne, Hermosa Beach, Inglewood, Lawndale, Lomita, Manhattan beach, Palos Verdes Estates, Rancho Palos Verdes, Redondo Beach, Rolling Hills, Rolling Hills Estates, and Torrance. The South Bay also includes the 15th District of the City of Los Angeles (the LA Strip) and portions of unincorporated Los Angeles County.
The Exxon/Mobil refinery in Torrance and the Chevron refinery in El Segundo are both located in the South Bay and are each a big part of the carbon-based economy that causes the majority of climate change – although you’ll never get either of these corporations to admit this truth or take responsibility for it. They’re kind of funny that way.
Lest you think your Creative Greenius spends all his time at the keyboard ruminating about issues national and global, this morning I got up early so I would be awake enough to drive across town to Charles Payne’s house on the other side of Torrance, in Old Town. Charles heads up the Old Torrance Neighborhood Association and yesterday I read in my local paper, an item headlined, “Volunteers needed for clean up day.”
The blurb in the Breeze said,
It sounded like the perfect way to spend Saturday morning and another great opportunity to respond to President Obama’s call for service.
For more than a year now in this blog I’ve been researching and reporting on climate change, energy and transportation issues and related environmental stories covering them on both a personal and a global perspective. I haven’t been breaking any hard news, I’ve just been spreading the news that doesn’t get enough attention and adding my take on top of it for the majority of my readers who don’t have the time to dig as deep as I do.
I have to admit I’ve shared a pretty dire world view when it comes to the current and coming impacts of climate change.
That’s what happens when you start each morning reading blog’s like Joseph Romm’s Climate Progress and following the work of Dr. James Hansen and the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change.
But during this same past year, I’ve also been attending the meetings of the South Bay Cities Green Task Force.
I’m there as one of the only independent citizens – and of course as the Creative Greenius, but I’m mostly there because I’m an aspiring policy wonk and I eat the content of these meetings up. The truth is, I’m unabashedly fascinated by and truly interested in the work they’re doing. And the work they’re doing brings California’s leading edge fight against global warming right into my neighborhood and into my home. It is, as the cliche puts it, where the rubber meets the road, and the road is the street I live on.
Creative Greenius 