At Inside Climate News, Dan Gearino writes on subject dear to my heart: getting solar into the hands of people who can be helped most with the savings on electrical bills that solar can provide. An excerpt:
Low-income households in Colorado are getting a new question during visits from energy assistance agencies: Have you considered solar panels?
It's an innovative approach to solving two challenges at once: reducing greenhouse gas emissions as the effects of climate change appear across the state, and lowering low-income families' electricity bills.
The results can make a big difference for residents like Joe Anderson, whose power bills have been cut by two-thirds since 13 solar panels were installed free-of-charge on his ranch-style house under one Colorado program. "I felt like I kind of got the luck of the draw," he said.
Colorado is emerging as a national model for how to expand renewable energy to low-income homes.
The state has been pursuing low-income solar programs since 2015, and it's on track to have 20 megawatts installed by the end of 2019 as those programs ramp up. The total is the combination of several programs that, working with utilities and charitable organizations, provide rooftop installations and community solar arrays to help customers save money.
One key to Colorado's success is that much of the rooftop solar work is being run by county and regional weatherization offices that already provide insulation and other energy efficiency services. [...]
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QUOTATION
“There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts - figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.”
~~Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (1935)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2013—CWA’s Larry Cohen: ‘This is not democracy!’
In a number of actions across the country today, working families and activists will be telling the Senate it's time to confirm the five nominees to the National Labor Relations Board that Republicans have been obstructing. Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America, writes about what's at stake if the NLRB positions aren't filled, and the Board is shut down.
Today, under the watch of another Democratic President and a Democratic majority in the Senate, the NLRB is now in danger of being completely stripped of its authority. The protections that workers fought and died for, already diminished by subsequent legislation and court decisions, will soon disappear if the Senate fails to confirm the president’s nominees before its summer recess. [...]
If the Senate does not act, we’ll soon be celebrating Labor Day without any labor law. Zero enforcement and no protections for 80 million American workers in the private sector.