How to use this Page

Chip Jacobs, co-author of Smogtown, offers his view on "California's Solar Scorecard in the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times: "Californians: meet your sun. Or, rather, remember it. Despite living in America’s premier green state, most of the state’s homeowners continue to rebuff solar power as a way to shrink their electricity bills, and simply plug into their local public utility much as their parents did. With costs still too high for individual homeowners, the beneficiaries of all those subsidies are corporations and utilities. The numbers paint the apathetic picture. Out of 7.7-million single family homes statewide, only about 50,000 have roof-mounted photovoltaic cells. In Los Angeles, the nation’s eighth sunniest city, only 1,627 homes boast solar hookups.

Just as distressing as that skimpy adoption rate, not one recognizable leader — not L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, not Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — has done enough from the bully pulpit recently to highlight home-based solar. The presumption seems to be that when the Wal-Marts of the world and the utilities themselves better harness renewable sources (think massive solar installations and wind farms), everybody will have.

Besides, we’re lobbing money at the problem. The state plans to spend $3.3 billion, including $2.2 billion under the ratepayer-funded California Solar Initiative, to add 3,000 megawatts of sun-generated power by 2016. To date, about 256 megawatts have come on line — a real achievement considering that during the 1980s and 1990s, only nine megawatts were added here in America’s solar capital.

Trouble is, corporations and institutions will scarf up most of that new capacity, when record state and federal subsidies can almost halve consumers’ equipment costs. Why? First, the outreach has been spotty. Second, even with those sweeteners, a typical home solar setup can run $24,000, and most people don’t have that disposable cash to lower their long-term electricity expenses after the Great Recession.

It didn’t have to be this way. Californians remember the electricity brownouts of the early 2000s. They know slowing climate change will mean new taxes, as it already has in L.A., and that new power plants are unlikely. A recent state law requiring utilities to pay homeowners for excess solar power they generate might have helped, but critics believe it’s too stingy — and utility-oriented — to ignite consumer excitement.

So it’s more hypocrisy in the Golden State, where we promote eco-living with low-carbon restaurants and carpool lanes and yet fail to inspire millions to tap that gargantuan generator in the sky."

The Santa Monica Public Library has selected Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, to receive the 2009 Adult Local Impact Award. For three consecutive years the Library has awarded a Green Prize for Sustainable Literature. I'm pleased to inform you that the Green Prize committee has selected your book, . This year, according to librarian Nancy Bender, "the decision to award Smogtown the Green Prize was unanimous; the Committee found it a fascinating take on Los Angeles history."

Booklist, the book review arm of the American Library Association, has announced the ten best books on the environment this year and Smogtown, by Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly, has made the list: "A fun book about smog? Jacobs and Kelly capture the aura of 1950s sci-fi movies in this lively history of Los Angeles’ monstrous smog." Smogtown was also recently featured in Capitol Weekly magazine. For all the latest news on this fascinating history of pollution in Los Angeles, check out the Smogtown blog.

Ian Volner takes on Smogtown, by Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly, in the new issue of Bookforum: "A meticulous chronicle of the city’s signature airborne grime and of the civic and social forces that emerged to stop it. The authors, Los Angeles–based journalists Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly, bring LA back to its unglitzy basics in a story of greed, pollution, and molasses-slow political change. Their history describes a decidedly dreary Los Angeles: Patio furniture fades, flowers die, and a man’s coral-colored tie turns bluish-purple over the course of an afternoon—all due to the smog that rolled into the city quite unannounced one morning in 1943. 'The blocked skies,' write Jacobs and Kelly, 'were tantamount to acne on a beauty queen.' . . .But the point of Smogtown is well made: that the truth really is inconvenient. Nearly fifty years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, we are coming to know the cost of environmental stewardship in blood, sweat, and dollars. The story of Smogtown is that of a city vying against time to reconcile incommensurables. Any city, or any country, is only as amenable to improvement as its citizens are prepared for change. It’s an uphill slog the whole way."

The September 1 issue of Booklist offers a rave starred review of Smogtown: The Long-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, by Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly:

"Remember those great 1950s horror movies, when some superpowerful creature menaced a city while the citizens panicked, law enforcement officials bumbled, politicians pontificated, and plucky scientists worked at a fever pitch to find something, anything, to kill the monster? That’s pretty much the feel of this remarkably entertaining and informative chronicle of the birth and—so far—inexorable evolution of smog. On July 8, 1943, smog attacked Los Angeles without warning (well, not much warning). People didn’t know what to make of this gray mist that blanketed the city, and when it didn’t go away (or went away and then came back), the citizenry began to react in strange ways: there were rumors, for example, that this smelly cloud was some sort of chemical attack by the Japanese—less than a year after Pearl Harbor, this claim didn’t sound so silly. By 1947, when it looked like smog was here to stay, the governor of California created the country’s first smog agency. The following year, a documentary about smog was released in theaters, animated by some guy named Walt Disney, and a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter was writing investigative pieces about the stinky mist. Later, smog helped launch Ralph Nader’s crusading career, and today it’s a central theme in the environmentalism movement. This book is just amazing, a gripping story well told, with the requisite plucky scientists (including Arie Haagen-Smit, a Dutch biochemist who was “the Elvis of his field”), hapless politicians, and a nebulous biochemical villain who just will not be stopped."