Smokestacks: sure sign of an unneeded con-job

When you see a smokestack, you are viewing a palpable representation of the old falsehood "the solution to pollution is dilution".

This is the first level of deception. Diluting only defers the problem, avoiding a solution.

More importantly, the smokestack has to be dispensing poison, toxic waste. Otherwise, there would be no reason to build such an expensive anomaly. The smokestack is the evidence of a grand deception, the spreading of that poison over people who don't even know it's coming.

For example, the refineries of Wilmington, California, spew a cauldron of chemical waste into the air, much of it rising high up into the atmosphere. The California Air Quality Management District (AQMD) looks to "prevailing winds" to solve the problem of this pollution, and to lessen the effects of it.

Refineries are exempted from many environmental laws, get subsidized water and electric, and are allowed to permanently defile former wetlands based on the claimed necessity of gasoline.

But what if gasoline is not necessary? What if solar power and plug-in cars could make gasoline a rarely-used fuel, and allow that refinery to be removed and the land healed? No one has ever totalled up the benefits of removing those monstrosities sitting to windward of Los Angeles.

Downwind breathers, from West Long Beach to Downey, all the way to Pomona and Corona, may not notice or even know about this refinery, may not be aware of the specious argument for its necessity. But the ghastly products of those smokestacks rain down on their air supply, on their homes, gardens, streets, and open fields. What doesn't stick in their family's lungs gets washed into rivers and into the Ocean, a particularly nasty component of the recondite problem of "urban runoff".

No one warns those who live inland, who unknowingly bear the brunt of these nightly emissions from known polluters. But the costly effects are very real, from health-care costs shifted to the Taxpayer from the oil companies, to cleanup, environmental degradation, air quality, misery, discomfort, permanent lung damage, death that's quantified by the AQMD as "only" 25 per million per year, and other debits.

Is the insistence on burning gasoline in cars worth this obscene cost, this permanent scarring of kids lungs and the death of thousands?

More generally, the debris from Chinese coal-fired and other polluters is now being carried by the jet stream across the Pacific, landing not only in California but all over the world. It's only a matter of time before there's no place left to "dilute" it to.

Nor is the current re-fascination with nuclear power any solution. Pollution from the Chernobyl disaster, and from other nuclear plants and open-air nuke bombs, has spread all over the world, significantly raising background radiation and causing pockets of severe nuclear contamination. There's no safe nuke except no nuke.

It wouldn't be so outrageous and inherently evil if there were no alternative to coal, petroleum and/or nuke power.

But it's clearly demonstrable that mere rooftop solar electric power could generate all our current domestic electric demand, as well as generate enough excess electric to power all of our cars and move cargo containers if it were done by electric motors.

Want proof? The numbers are easy to work out, showing theoretically how it can be done.

In a practical vein, to demonstrate, just look at any of those homes in the Los Angeles area who have plug-in cars and rooftop solar power.

Our own roof, covered only about 30% with low-efficiency solar panels, generates about all the electric to power two Toyota RAV4-EV plug-in Electric cars more than 20,000 miles per year, plus all our domestic electric power.

20,000 miles in a RAV4-EV (small SUV) takes 4,000 kWh of electric power, about 350 kWh per month, which is only a fraction of our actual production. The grid needs power in the daytime, so we "sell" our excess electric to the grid during the day, and usually charge slowly off-peak, when electric costs less. This enables us to be of service to the grid, lowering the daytime peak and raising the nightly need to shut down big generators, since they can "sell" the power for charging cars at night.

So in fact, our EV-PV household actually helps the grid while enabling us to drive free of pollution -- and to use our money to pay off our solar system instead of spending it at the Chevron station to power the pollution of their refineries.

Why not others?

If plug-in cars were for sale, any homeowner could buy one, and the savings from not buying gasoline would allow financing a rooftop solar system. That's why Chevron worked so hard to make sure that you don't have the choice of purchasing a plug-in car.