Residents of northwest Washington are so lucky to live in a place as beautiful as the Puget Sound; blue skies, Mount Rainier in the distance, what’s not to love? In a place so gorgeous, it’s easy to forget how much we trash it.

Gas and coal-fired plants provide over half of our nation’s energy, with more problems arising every day. We use destructive measures to attain it, spending millions of dollars in the process, and send it back out into the pristine gardens of Mother Nature in massive quantities of pollution. The saddest part of it all is that we have an alternative energy source that is reliable, pollution-free and vastly untapped. The answer is simple. The answer is solar.

In western Washington, we get 30 percent more sunlight than Germany, the world’s leader in solar energy. If we were to install 150,000 solar rooftops by 2020, Washington could prevent carbon dioxide from 460,000 cars out of our atmosphere. We already have the buildings, we have the sun, all we need is the support for solar.

It’s time for Washington to be a leader. It’s time for us to go solar.

Diana Lloyd-Jones, Seattle