Without permission but with gratitude.

We had the pleasure of attending a conference talk by Marc Tarpenning, founder of Tesla and partner at Spero Ventures, whose conference it was. While telling his story, Tarpenning showed the above slide, which we present here as a gem of simplicity.

Climate change is a confoundingly, crippingly complicated thing to talk about, and its many solutions can be just as convoluted.

Of course climate issues are complicated! It’s all tangled in an inextricable web of complex natural systems — in the soil, it the oceans, in the atmosphere, and (in the case of solutions) in the wildest aspirational bounds of our imaginations.

But this slide demonstrates just how simple and elegant can be both a solution and how we talk about it. As simple as an old windmill gently rotating next to its barn, as elegant as a water-wheel dipping into a river — representing as they do, the provision of exactly the amount of carbon-neutral power that was needed to do the thing inside the buildings to which they were attached.

With solar costs plummeting as they are, why not commit to individually powering every car (and its garage, and its lawnmower) with nothing more than the footprint of the building it resides in? Tarpenning wasn’t making that point exactly, but the slide does, and we should model as many future innovations as we can on such clear thinking and storytelling.

Windmill part of our Drought’s End tour last March.

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In the meantime, by the way, the solar carport is a not “a thing”… but should be. Go ahead and search for “solar carport” or “solar canopy.” As with all things solar, your buying options are as bewildering and confusing as the above image is not.

Anybody who wanted to make a company to specialize in solar carports — a structure with four posts and a roof covered with solar ideally arranged to catch the sun — with straightforward marketing, installation included, systematically complying with building codes — could make a fortune, and get a lot of human mobility off the grid forever.  Please do this now.