On June 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter—wearing a bushy haircut and a wide necktie—invited dignitaries and reporters to the White House roof to watch the installation of 32 solar hot water panels. “A generation from now,” he told them, “this solar heater could either be a masterpiece, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it could be just a small part of one of our greatest and most exciting adventures.” “The American people never did it.”
A generation later, one of those paintings appeared in a private museum in the offices of a businessman named Huang Ming, in Dezhou, China. In the spring of 2010, I interviewed Ming, who was building an enormous fortune by installing the same solar water heaters across the country. If you’re traveling to a Chinese city, look down and you might see one of the devices on every other surface; Even then ninety-five percent of the homes had a plaque. Ming had built a truly magnificent residence – the so-called Palace of the Sun and Moon looked like something out of “The Jetsons,” with two sweeping horseshoes of solar panels that resembled the rings of Saturn cut in half. Ming described Carter as a visionary, and shook his head a little regretfully at the path America did not take.
This trajectory – well, it’s really painful to look at now, from the point of view of the Earth as the poles are rapidly melting, where Africa may lose fifteen percent a year of its GDP per capita due to the effects of global warming and where one of the current president’s senior climate advisors recently said that we Now we need “a transformation of the global economy on a scale and scale never before seen in human history” in order to “create a livable future for ourselves and our children.” Jimmy Carter, who was elected in 1976, was not focused on global warming, although advisers began to warn him about it. Even without the existential impetus of climate change, the struggle to stay politically afloat during the geopolitical crises that came with the twin oil shocks of the 1970s—and which OPECThe embargo imposed by Iran, due in large part to the Iranian revolution – he felt how big the risks actually were. The energy crisis, he told Americans early on, using adult language that it’s impossible to imagine an American president using today, was a reminder that “ours is the most extravagant nation on earth.”
By 1979, gas station lines were causing panic in the suburbs and weakening his popularity. But instead of simply drilling more oil wells (America was only ten years away from the Santa Barbara oil spill and the first Earth Day), he treated the problem as an opportunity. He said: “All the legislation in the world cannot fix what is wrong with America.” “Many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumerism.” It is time to work on the realization that “owning and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.” . . The accumulation of material goods cannot fill the void of a life that has no confidence or purpose.
That worldview, the same one for which Carter later won praise, amid pictures of him building homes for the poor, teaching Sunday school, and holding the hand of Rosalynn, his beloved wife of seventy-seven years, in the same humble home in which they lived for decades Time, until her death last year, was less popular politically. And he was not unpopular: with just a few weeks to go until the 1980 election, he was still far ahead in the polls, before Ronald Reagan’s final surge ended his political career. But they were not popular enough: That election was the turning point in our national political life, when we turned our backs on the idea of America as a collective enterprise we had pursued since Franklin Roosevelt, and embraced instead the view that government is the problem. That markets take care of all ills, and that our job is to take care of ourselves as individuals. Reagan had no concerns about potholes everywhere: gas prices dropped, cars turned to SUVs, and we began to push the earth toward the brink.
However, it was not just lofty sentiments that Carter offered in the run-up to the 1980 election. In fact, in the wake of the oil shocks, his main policy proposal was solar energy. His chief domestic policy adviser, Stuart Eisenstat, told him that “a strong solar message and program will be critical in trying to counter the desperation that public opinion polls show about energy. . . . I am absolutely convinced that Congress and the American people want a project like The Manhattan Alternative Energy Development Project agreed and began proposing measures aimed at ensuring that by the year 2000, one-fifth of the nation’s energy would come from solar energy and called for spending $100 million per fiscal year 1980 to create a solar bank. He requested hundreds of millions more to fund solar energy projects and research, offered $1 billion in tax breaks to homeowners who wanted to put panels on their roofs or install wind energy systems, declared May 3, 1978, and gave a speech (In the pouring rain, and he was characteristically unlucky) from a federal solar energy research facility in Golden, Colorado. “The question is no longer whether solar energy is effective or not,” he said. “We know it is.” He works. The only question is how to reduce costs so that solar energy can be used more widely, thus putting an end to high oil prices. He continued: “No one can block the sunlight. There is no cartel controlling the sun. Its energy will not run out. Will not pollute the air. Our water will not be poisoned. It is free of unpleasant odor and smog. The sun’s energy just needs to be collected, stored and used.
Carter was right. If we had embarked on a massive solar research project at that time, we could have reduced the costs of renewable energy much more quickly than we did. There has not been a single technological advance that has finally brought the cost of solar energy below the cost of fossil fuels in the past decade, but rather just a long series of iterative improvements that could have come much faster if we had worked aggressively. For example, the Manhattan. Instead, Reagan immediately cut the solar research budget by eighty-five percent and eliminated the tax credit for solar panels, devastating the nascent industry. His national security adviser, Richard Allen, told Reagan about a book discrediting solar energy, which the author claimed was “nothing more than a continuation of the political wars of a decade ago by other means. . . . Whereas previously salvation could be had from The revolution, it will now come from everyone’s best friend, that great, simple cure for all energy ills, the sun. The culture war against clean energy has begun.