Soft Path

Rooftop solar project
Years ago, I read a book by William Ophuls. I bet Jerry Brown read that book, too. It emphasized the importance of making a number of small, "soft path" projects to meet our energy needs, rather than the old "hard path" approach of a few, massively huge projects to save the world.

Projects like this one, by SCE, fits into the soft path approach, and will be much more welcomed by environmentalists than will proposals for massive solar farms that would cover miles and miles of desert lands.

Photo: http://www.metaefficient.com/wp-content/uploads/rooftop-solar-modules.jpg

Distributed tech for

Distributed tech for electricity generation makes sense, but there are political challenges.

Prop 16 that failed (thankfully) would have harmed distributed production, even with the green energy exceptions written into it.

There are also problems with distributed tech, like effects to the environment right around the energy conversion sites.

Thanks for the book reference. Never heard of it.

Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity

That was the book title. Funny, because I first read it as a freshman (can't remember the course--might have been geograhy or English). I found it largely incomprehensible. Then it was assigned to me about three years later in a political science class. Suddenly, it was very straightforward. Obviously, my reading comprehension improved a great deal over those three years. Nice to know I wasn't getting dumber. At least not back then. :D