...Carter was correct. Had we embarked on an enormous project of solar research then and there, we could have cut the costs of renewable energy far faster than we did. There was no single technological breakthrough that finally lowered the cost of solar power below that of fossil fuel in the past decade, just a long series of iterative improvements that could have come much faster had we worked with the vigor of, say, the Manhattan Project. Instead, Reagan immediately cut the budget for solar research by eighty-five per cent and did away with the tax credit for solar panels, decimating the infant industry. His national-security adviser, Richard Allen, told Reagan about a book denigrating solar energy, whose author had claimed that it was "little more than a continuation of the political wars of a decade ago by other means. . . . Where salvation was once to be gotten from the Revolution, now it will come from everyone's best friend, that great and simplistic cure of all energy ills, the sun." The culture war against clean energy had begun...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/jimmy-carter-green-energy-visionary
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