Solar electric is indeed still more expensive than natural gas turbine electric, and pretty resource-intensive to make the panels. Solar hot water heating, however, would save us a bundle of energy and it is cheap, simple technology.
I figured Prop 23 was kind of bogus when I saw their graph of when unemployment was under 5.5% in California. It’s like 10% of the past 10 or 20 years. So what the prop is saying is, “we will cap our emissions… like… never.”
I also appreciate the clean-air standards, especially whenever I am in traffic behind a ’60’s or ’70’s-vintage car and smell its exhaust. That’s a distinctive smell that takes me back to my childhood, and when I imagine an entire LA Basin full of such cars and their resulting stench, I wince and think, “thank goodness for catalytic converters and pollution controls”.
