ESG and Me
In the midst of a global flurry of supposed interest in climate change, I finally had solar panels installed on my house. This is the culmination of forty years of waiting until the technology and the tax incentives aligned with my knowledge from as far back as the 70s and 80s that everybody in Arizona should have been living on solar energy.
Why did it take so long? Because the utility companies were not only far behind me in my passion for solar energy, but they were disincentivized to learn about it and purposely tried not to learn. We had big mining interests in the state, and a massive commitment to nuclear power that I knew nothing about when I moved to Arizona.
But some time in the 1980s, after I had built a geodesic dome house with John Hardaway and lived in it for ten years with a solar hot water heater and several hand-hewn solar appliances (like a solar bread baker), I was appointed by someone in state government to the newly formed Arizona Solar Energy Commission. All I remember of it is that I met some big home builders and utility company reps who were on it with me,
The Commission was a sinecure, designed not to do anything but to take care of the activist citizens who clamored for solar energy while Arizona Public Service built the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant, which was commissioned in 1988, after twelve years of construction. I was one of those activist citizens…
