Monday, August 8, 2022

Solar panel politics

Bill McKibben's latest book explains how we engineered a crisis of the social environment and, in the process, ensured an existential crisis of the natural environment. In this excerpt he discusses the disillusionment of politics-as-usual in a time that threatens unprecedentedly-urgent climate catastrophe. It's clearly not enough just to say you favor doing something about it, when you mean you'll do something about it when the political winds or your political fortunes shift.

...

"Now consider the even deeper crisis of climate change, a crisis that presents the planet with a nontrivial chance that our civilizations could simply collapse in the decades ahead. What might we have done differently in the 1970s, even before we really understood the danger that carbon dioxide was posing? It turns out that in those oil shock years the Carter administration fixed on one key solution: massive government support for developing solar power. “A strong solar message and program,” the president’s domestic policy advisor Stuart Eizenstat told him, “will be important in trying to counter the hopelessness which polls are showing the public feels about energy. I’m quite convinced Congress and the American people want a Manhattan-type project on alternative energy development.” Carter agreed to the plan—indeed, he said a fifth of the country’s energy should come from solar power by 2000. He called for spending a billion dollars in fiscal year 1980 to create a Solar Bank, to fund research, and to provide homeowners with loans for putting up panels. He officially declared May 3, 1978, as Sun Day, calling “upon the American people to observe that day with appropriate activities and ceremonies that will demonstrate the potential of solar energy,” and directing “all appropriate Federal agencies to support this national observance.” He observed this first solar holiday by traveling to a mountaintop in Golden, Colorado, home to a federal solar research facility: “The question is no longer whether solar energy works,” he told a crowd (in a driving rain). “We know it works. The only question is how to cut costs so that solar power can be used more widely and so that it will set a cap on rising oil prices. In many places, solar heating is as economical today as power from nonrenewable sources.” He added, “Nobody can embargo sunlight. No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters. It’s free from stench and smog. The sun’s power needs only to be collected, stored, and used.” And then a year later he did something even more important: on June 20, 1979, he invited dignitaries and reporters onto the roof of the White House to watch the installation of thirty solar hot-water heating panels. “A generation from now,” he said, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.” In truth, it took much less than a generation to deliver the verdict: literal museum piece. Shortly after taking office, Reagan cut the renewable energy research budget by 85 percent and let the tax credits for solar panels expire; he did away with assistance for weatherizing homes and ended energy efficiency requirements for appliances; his national security advisor, Richard Allen, circulated an article insisting that the solar “energy crusade 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, the great and simplistic cure of all energy ills, the sun.” Instead, Reagan pushed hard for increased oil drilling in the United States, and for making sure that no pesky regulations got in the way. “First, we must decide that ‘less’ is not enough,” he said. “Next, we must remove government obstacles to energy production.… Putting the market system to work for these objectives is an essential first step for their achievement.” And so in 1986 the Reagan administration took the panels down from the White House roof and stored them away in a Virginia warehouse. A top White House official—the Washington Post speculated it was U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese—thought the equipment was a “joke.” An official spokesman said, “Putting them back up would be very unwise, based on cost.” As it happens, I know a little about those panels. They were rescued from that Virginia warehouse by a faculty member at Unity College, a small school in a very rural corner of Maine, where for years they sat on the roof of the cafeteria, heating the water used in the kitchen. The college gave away or sold a few of them: I learned about them in 2008 when I visited the Sun-Moon Mansion, the headquarters of China’s largest solar hot-water company. Huang Ming, who’d founded the company, kept one of Carter’s panels in a place of honor in a small museum of renewable energy just off his executive offices. The panels, he said, had helped inspire him to create a business that was currently heating the water for a quarter billion of his countrymen—some Chinese cities, viewed from the air, look as if every single building has a solar hot-water heater on top. Anyway, Unity officials agreed to hand me a couple more of the historic panels, and so in 2010 I rented a van, hitched a trailer behind it, and began dragging them south toward the White House. It was a fun road trip—three students and a professor from Unity were along, so there were iPod playlists and lots of snacks. We hosted rallies in Boston, New York, and Baltimore—we’d pour a gallon of water in the top of the heater, point it at the sun, and eight or nine minutes later steam would be churning out: thirty-one years later these things worked as well as they did the day they went up. Our hope, of course, was that Barack Obama (whom we all had worked to elect) might symbolically reinstall one, up top of his new house. We thought it made sense: when the First Lady had planted the White House garden a year before, seed sales had gone up 30 percent. We thought that the gift might help the administration restart solar history after three decades. But no. Arriving in Washington, we were directed by administration officials to a side door at the Executive Office Building—the five of us were ushered by an intern in a blue blazer into the wood-paneled room where, once, the UN Charter had been drafted. This day, a trio of what the New York Times called “midlevel White House” officials met with us, in the single most frustrating example of bureaucratic obstruction I’ve ever gotten to witness close up. First they filibustered—long boilerplate explanations of how the administration was “building a bigger, better, smarter electric grid, all while creating new sustainable jobs.” I sat back and let the three students respond, and they were magnificent: “Thank you for your good work,” they said politely, over and over. “But no one really knows about it—certainly not our friends, who voted for Obama but are increasingly disillusioned. What better way to spread the word about what you’re up to than the high-profile move of putting solar panels back on the roof?” No, said the officials, but they refused to say why. Literally refused. The students asked, again and again, and the woman who was leading the conversation kept repeating the same phrase: “If reporters call and ask us, we will provide our rationale.” But they wouldn’t provide it to us, and they wouldn’t pose for a picture with the students, and they wouldn’t accept the old panel even to put in storage. Eventually we were back on the sidewalk, and the three college students were talking to reporters. They were in tears—of disappointment, but also I think of genuine perplexity. Amanda Nelson: “I didn’t expect I’d get to shake President Obama’s hand, but it was really shocking to me to find out that they really didn’t seem to care. They couldn’t even give us a statement.” Elliott Altomare: “We went in without any doubt about the importance of this. They handed us a pamphlet.” Measured the way activists measure things, it was entirely worth it: three stories in the Times, plenty of other coverage. We’d moved the needle a little further along. But I felt a little guilty about disillusioning these three students: they’d seen early on some of the cowardice and moral compromise inherent in holding power. And—for all my advanced years—I felt a little disillusioned too. It certainly made it easier to come back to the White House the next year and help organize the mass arrests on that same street corner that marked the start of the national fight over the Keystone XL Pipeline. In time we won that battle: we forced Obama to block KXL, the first loss of that kind Big Oil had ever suffered. And in time—safely into his second term—Obama did indeed put solar panels up on the White House roof. “The project, which helps demonstrate that historic buildings can incorporate solar energy and energy efficiency upgrades, is estimated to pay for itself in energy savings over the next eight years,” a spokesman said. In retrospect, it was pretty clear why Obama wanted nothing to do with those solar panels: they were tainted by their association with Carter. The 1980 election, thirty years later, still dominated our politics. We’d made a choice then, and that choice still held sway, even in the administration of our first Black president, a man who on the night of his nomination had said “this [is] the moment when the rise of the oceans [begins] to slow and our planet [begins] to heal.” But he calculated that we hadn’t yet reached the moment when we could move past that earlier moment in our political history. Read the quote from Obama again that I printed a few pages ago: “Through Clinton and even through how I thought about these issues when I first came into office, I think there was a residual willingness to accept the political constraints that we’d inherited from the post-Reagan era,” he said. “Probably there was an embrace of market solutions to a whole host of problems that wasn’t entirely justified.” Probably. INSTEAD OF MOVING toward solar energy in the Reagan years, we stepped on the gas pedal—literally—in our lifestyles, and on the brake—metaphorically—in the drive for something like social justice." (Continues)

The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened" by Bill McKibben: https://a.co/i7UwQMY

==

McKibben in The New Yorker...

No comments:

Post a Comment