Leibowitz, the advertising guy, pointed me toward a recent BBMG poll, first cited in Brandweek. The poll found that while 28 percent of consumers said it was "very important" to buy from companies who do good things for the planet, only 17 percent reported "always" doing so.
Even that number, I'm betting, is inflated. "Always?" Just as suspicious is the 16 percent who reported taking a reusable bag with them while shopping. Just go to Whole Foods some day and watch the line. You may be at the most cheerfully "green" grocery chain around, but you're still not going to see one out of every six shoppers putting their groceries into little cloth bags.
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Or take solar panels. Jim Arwood, director of the energy office of the Arizona Department of Commerce, is a big believer in solar power. Solar panels on his roof supply almost half of the energy used by his household. Even better, because the panels connect to the electric grid, the energy produced by those panels is never wasted. It goes back into the system to provide power for other homes, reducing the state's reliance on dirtier forms of energy — and earning Arwood credits from APS in the process.
But here's the rub.
Arwood is one of only 1,642 people in the entire state who've put up panels connecting to the grid. Seven times as many Arizonans voted for Fred Thompson after he quit the presidential race. Forty-two times as many people have outstanding warrants for their arrest in Maricopa County alone.
It's truly ridiculous. We're living in the sunniest state in the Union. We have tax incentives up the ying-yang. Students at Arizona State University's School of Global Management recently concluded that, thanks to those two factors, a medium-size set of panels would pay for itself in approximately 17 years. For an upper-middle-class family, that's not a bad equation.
And yet, for all the green hype flooding my mailbox, hardly anybody is doing it. California last year launched a "Million Solar Roofs" initiative, with the goal of plugging that many homes into the grid.
In Arizona, we'll be lucky to get 100,000.
Jim Arwood knows that he's still in a very small minority when it comes to personal solar generation, but he's optimistic. He clearly thinks I'm way too cynical about this state's underutilization of solar. "Thirty years ago, the 'solar industry' was a handful of backyard inventors," he says. "It takes time, but we're making a whole lot of progress."
But the path that progress is taking, I think, illustrates a bigger truth.
We can talk all we want about free enterprise, and individuals taking responsibility. We can read 411-page books designed to make us more green.
But we're not going to convert even a fraction of the state to renewable resources by depending on well-meaning individuals. Just look at how few homes have bothered to finance solar panel systems. If it isn't as easy as flashing a credit card or dropping an empty Coke can into a recycling bin, most of us simply won't do it.
And if it's not leading to a new outfit, even a credit card swipe has proved too difficult for 99 percent of us. Literally. APS has a "Green Choice" program, in which customers can opt to pay a little extra to get power from renewable sources. A spokesman says it costs the average household only about $11 a month. Still, fewer than 1 percent of the utility's customers have opted in.
But here's where it gets interesting. Even though individuals have proved utterly unwilling to do the green thing, we keep saying in polls that we care about the environment. You can't blame the politicians for thinking we really mean it.
So Arizona is about to get frog-marched into going green.
Right now, Arizona utilities are required to generate only 1 percent of their power from renewable resources. By 2025, though, the Arizona Corporation Commission is increasing that requirement to 15 percent. That's huge — and Arwood believes it's already making a difference. He points to the three-square-mile Solana Generating Station proposed for the Gila Bend area. It will rely on new technology to turn solar power into electricity, with a complexity far beyond the simple heat-storing rooftop panels.
In its first year, Solana is expected to generate 20 times more solar power than the entire state generates today.
Solana has its drawbacks. Despite its huge size, it's expected to generate enough power for only 70,000 homes, a mere fraction of the state's load. And it won't be cheap. Its energy will be 20 percent more costly than traditional sources. Hey, you said you wanted to save the Earth, right?
But there's an interesting twist in how it all could work. Thanks to the renewable-energy mandates, power in Arizona is likely to get more expensive. And as that happens, individuals will have more incentive to do their part. After all, a rooftop solar panel system will pay for itself a lot more quickly if the cost of electricity is sky high.
Just look at California. Because of heavy demand there, and local environmental pressures that have kept new coal-burning plants from being built there, it has to rely on power from other states. It's not cheap.
