@BrianPierce I address that in the article.

The days of acid-rain are over. Burning of "dirty coal" is prohibited. What's coming to kill us is CO2.

@shuttersparks Here in #newengland downwind of the Rust Belt, we still have to be careful about mercury if eating fish from #flyfishing but not sure if that's only from previous decades or ongoing mercury release.

@BrianPierce Yeah, that's from the old days when none of that was regulated and power plants burned the cheapest fuel they could find.

The Mississippi River bed is still thick with lead compounds from the days of leaded gasoline. I'm old so I remember putting "ethyl" gas in the car. All gas had tetraethyl lead in it to raise the octane number and lubricate the engine's valves. I wonder how many people today are even aware of why we burn unleaded gas and why it even matters. I'll bet the only people who know these days are car enthusiasts who want to restore and drive a 1960s vintage car. You have to replace the valves and seats with modern valves that can operate on unleaded gas without burning.

But yeah, the millions of tons of lead on the Miss. River bottom will be there for thousands of years.

@matt Absolutely. I'm having a meeting this coming week with a partner on this project and electricity is one of the topics. Solar is on the table.

Unfortunately, West Virginia isn't the greatest place for solar because of low insolation and 40 degree latitude. For much of the year, West Virginia is the Land of Perpetual Thick Dreary Overcast. Haha. It's still worth it, just not as exciting as having solar in the California desert.

@shuttersparks No doubt re. WV and solar! My favorite go-to stat: Elkins (nearest “metro” to us) is nearly as cloudy as Portland. https://www.currentresults.com/Weather-Extremes/US/cloudiest.php

@matt Yeah, it's bad. I notice it because I'm originally from Southern California. My friends are sick of my antics. When the sun makes one of its rare appearances, I start staggering and say, "Oh my God, the sun's out. I don't know how to act. I feel disoriented." And they roll their eyes and try to ignore me.

@shuttersparks Winter can be a tough slog! I’m grateful for outdoor sports and for light therapy.

@matt Yeah, fortunately I'm not affected by SAD. But a friend I've known for over 25 years suffers from seasonal affective disorder, yet they remain here.

I'm an indoor person so I just laugh at the silly weather or sometimes get annoyed when the cold, dreary drizzles go on for days and you can't get anything outside done. The mucky mud doesn't even have time to dry and it's drizzling again. If I were an outdoors type I simply wouldn't live here. The weather is ridiculous.

@matt Elkins metro. I'm down below you in Clarksburg.

@shelenn I did. Been talking about it for years. But nobody listens to me. Lol.

Yeah, we still need the backbone-style grid for transporting large aggregate amounts of power but at the residential level a new way of thinking in terms of sharing has to be applied going forward. Fortunately, electronic technology is up to the job nowadays.

If my neighbor three houses down needs to charge his car at a fast rate, the battery banks in neighboring homes need to pick up most of the load.

In addition to generation and distribution for sale, electric utilities have to add power sharing as one of their primary functions, work out how the billing is going to work, and so on.

This would have been unimaginable 30, 40 years ago but we can do it today. We just have to want to. And since electric utility companies don't want to, they'll need some "forceful encouragement" from the government. After all, that's what government is for.