45 Years and Counting

                     45 YEARS AND COUNTING

      In 1977, after a failed marriage, I struck out on my own. As a single mom of two, we needed a place to live. The building process had always intrigued me and when a beautiful lot came on the market in my rural neighborhood, after taking several long deep breaths, I put in an offer to purchase. 

When accepted, a house plan was scrawled on a blank piece of paper, and a building designer turned it into a set of blueprints. The contractor I chose gave me a price of $50,000 to transform the drawings into a home of our own. Carefully I calculated every dollar.  

Construction began and money poured out of my account as we neared the finish line.  It was then I read in the newspaper about a new energy supply touted to change the world. Solar power. 
One application of solar power required putting glass panels on your roof that would heat and supply all the hot water a home needed. 

That got my attention because my fifteen-year-old daughter thought nothing of running an entire load of laundry to wash a pair of underwear, and both kids luxuriated in showers long enough to drain the tank. One of the bigger suckers of electricity is the generation of hot water.

Hmmmm, I thought. Reading further, the article went on to say President Carter had solar panels installed on the White House, which by the way were American made. He then persuaded Congress to promote the innovation far and wide by offering a tax break if the country’s citizens purchased them. The best of tax breaks is an ‘investment tax credit.’ It means when you’ve figured out what you will owe Uncle Sam after all other deductions, you can then subtract the amount paid for the solar system from the bottom line of what you owe for taxes that year. The President felt that kind of tax incentive would steer our country away from fossil fuels, which even then were choking our air and fouling our waters. 

Embracing solar, President Carter announced, puts us on the forefront of a new industry that’s going to be enormous.

The rate for an average hot water rooftop system was $1,700, a sizable chunk out of my $50,000 budget. But, I reasoned, it was like taking money out of one pocket and putting it in the other. Instead of paying that amount in taxes I too could take twenty minute showers, but with a clear conscious. 

When completed my roof sported two glass panels with pipes leading to a storage tank in the garage. In the neighborhood, the gleaming surfaces quickly became a topic of much wonder and speculation. 

“Does it work?” folks asked.
 
“Yes,” I replied.

“Did it reduce your electric bill?”

“It did,” I reported. 

When I installed those panels in 1977, the phrase ‘climate change’ was on no one’s lips. Fuel prices and pollution were the main driving forces for new solar and wind exploration industries. 

But a few years later, scientists began to worry that our planet was warming at a mysterious and life threatening rate. 

It was not however, a mystery to the petroleum companies. It has now been revealed that all those years ago they knew their products were largely responsible for the rising temperatures and its effects. Instead of alerting the public, they hid the knowledge. As the word got out anyway, they denied it. 

The petrol barons do a very effective job of smearing scientific data. To this day they continue on their merry way polluting the earth toward extinction in the pursuit of profits. Worldwide, TRILLIONS of dollars are demanded by them, and happily raked into their already bloated coffers through government subsidies. 

As of 2023, our current Republican party still calls human caused climate change a hoax and will allow no meaningful discussion. This from a party whose country is the second largest contributor of CO2 on the planet.  

I often get a case of the ‘what ifs’. We had the chance to be the world leader in solar, but we blew it. I often wonder where our country and planet would be now if Ronald Reagan, the president after Jimmy Carter, had not removed the solar panels from the White House roof in 1980, cancelled the tax breaks, and allowed himself to be held sway by the oil companies? 

Currently several lawsuits have been filed that would hold the five largest oil companies responsible, calling the petroleum industry’s behavior a ‘crime against humanity’. 

I feel honored to have been a very small part of the alternative energy movement, that started so many years ago, and is finally burgeoning. Fingers crossed it’s not too late.