Skip to main content

Inside America’s groundbreaking solar-powered health facility [theguardian.com]

 

By Pam Strayer, Photo: Eric Forberger/Business Wire/AP, The Guardian, October 13, 2022

It is not easy to rattle Rosa Vivian Fernandez. The chief executive of a California healthcare clinic, she sees the harsh realities that the low-income, largely Hispanic community served by the clinic faces every day.

But when Fernandez traveled to Puerto Rico in 2017 to visit family, she was shocked to see how deeply Hurricane Maria had devastated the island.

“All the healthcare centers – the ones that did not get flooded or destroyed by the storm – went down,” Fernandez said. More than 5,000 people died due to the violent Atlantic storm, which caused an estimated $90bn (£80bn) in property damages, wiping out the electrical grid. “People died from the lack of services,” she added.

[Please click here to read more.]

Add Comment

Comments (1)

Newest · Oldest · Popular

People need to hear, likely repetitively, that it’s no longer prudent to have all or even most infrastructure reliant on such traditional sources of power, regardless of — or, maybe, due to — collective humankind’s vulnerable over-reliance on planet-warming fossil fuels.

People also need to be informed or reminded that if the universal availability of a renewable-energy alternative, such as mass solar-energy harvestation, would come at the expense of the traditional ‘energy’ production companies’ large profits, one can expect obstacles, including the political and regulatory sort. And that if something notably conflicts with long-held and deeply entrenched corporate interests, even very progressive motions are greatly resisted, often enough successfully.

Additionally, there will be those who will rebut the renewable-energy type/concept altogether, perhaps solely on the illogic that if it was possible, it would have been patented already and made a few people superfluously rich.

While assuming fossil fuel industry CEOs are not foolish enough to actually believe that their descendants will somehow always evade the health repercussions related to their industry’s environmentally reckless decisions, one wonders whether the unlimited-profit objective/nature is somehow irresistible to those businesspeople, including the willingness to simultaneously allow an already threatened consumer base to continue so, if not be threatened even further? It somewhat brings to mind the allegorical fox stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown.  

Still, there must be a point at which the status quo — be it bone-dry-vegetation areas uncontrollably burning, unbreathable city air, or unprecedented high-death-toll weather events — will also end up hurting the industry's own bottom-line interests.

Post
Copyright © 2023, PACEsConnection. All rights reserved.
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×