Two couples are neighbors in Sunnyvale,California. One couple plants redwoods and drives a Prius. The other one installs solar panels and drives an electric car. The solar-panel couple sues the
redwood couple because the trees block the sun, making the panels less effective.
California has more eco-conscious people than anyplace else, and occasionally they are bound to collide.
Yet there is another and more fundamentally serious reason why this tale of backyard bickering — recounted in The Times recently — was more likely to occur in California than anywhere else: no state has done as much to sponsor, legitimize and reward environmental virtue.
California has long been an innovator. It passed laws governing automobile air pollution in 1966, well before Congress did. Since 1982, it has compensated utilities for helping consumers become
more efficient, in effect rewarding them for selling less energy, not more. And in 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a measure requiring home builders to offer buyers solar panels.Despite robust economic growth, the state’s per-capita electricity use has
been constant for 20 years, while the rest of the country’s rose 50 percent.
California also has been well ahead of Washington on climate change, regulating carbon-dioxide emissions from vehicles and taking steps to reduce industrial emissions of greenhouse gases by 25 percent by 2020.
Obviously, there will be costs associated with all this virtue, and for some — like the Sunnyvale couples — there will be shoving and pushing. Given the alternative of a less hospitable globe, these seem to be small sacrifices.