On June 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter—sporting a bushy haircut and a wide necktie—invited dignitaries and reporters onto the roof of the White House to watch the installation of thirty-two solar water-heating panels. “A generation from now,” he told them, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”
A generation later, one of those panels showed up in a private museum in the offices of an entrepreneur named Huang Ming, in the city of Dezhou, China. In the spring of 2010, I interviewed Ming, who was building a vast fortune by installing pretty much the same solar water heaters across the country. If you’re flying into a Chinese city, look down and you might see one of the devices on every other roof; even back then there were places where ninety-five per cent of homes sported a panel. Ming had built a truly remarkable headquarters—the so-called Sun-Moon Mansion 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 ruefully at the path America hadn’t followed.
That path—well, it’s truly painful to look back on it now, from the vantage point of an Earth where the poles are melting fast, where Africa may be losing fifteen per cent a year of its G.D.P. per capita because of the effects of warming, and where a senior climate adviser for the current President recently said that we now need “a transformation of the global economy on a size and scale that’s never occurred in human history” to “create a livable future for ourselves and our children.” Jimmy Carter, who was elected in 1976, wasn’t focussed on global warming, though advisers were beginning to warn him about it. Even without the existential impetus of climate change, though, struggling to stay politically afloat during the geopolitical crises that came with the twin oil shocks of the seventies—one caused by OPEC’s embargo, the other largely by the Iranian Revolution—he sensed how high the stakes really 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 wasteful nation on earth.”
By 1979, gas-station lines were causing alarm in suburbia, and knocking the edge off his popularity. But, instead of simply drilling more oil wells (America was just a decade removed from the Santa Barbara oil spill and the first Earth Day), he treated the trouble as an opportunity. “All the legislation in the world can’t fix what is wrong with America,” he said. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” It was time to act on the realization that “owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning . . . that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”
That world view—the very thing Carter has been lauded for in retrospect, amid images of him building houses for the poor, teaching Sunday school, and holding hands with Rosalynn, his beloved wife of seventy-seven years, in the same modest house in which they lived for decades, until her death, last year—was less popular politically. Not unpopular: with a few weeks to go until the 1980 election, he was still well ahead in the polls, before a late surge from Ronald Reagan ended his political career. But not popular enough: that election was the hinge point in our national political life, when we turned our back on the idea of America as a group project that we’d been pursuing since F.D.R., and instead embraced the vision that government was the problem, that markets took care of all ills, that our job was to look after our own individual selves. Reagan had no qualms about drilling everywhere: the price of gas dropped, cars turned into S.U.V.s, and we started driving the Earth toward the edge of the cliff.
It wasn’t just noble sentiments that Carter offered in the leadup to the 1980 election, however. In fact, in the wake of the oil shocks, his main policy proposal was for solar power. His main domestic-policy adviser, Stuart Eizenstat, told him that “a strong solar message and program 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 and started proposing measures designed to make sure that, by the year 2000, a fifth of the country’s energy would come from solar power. He called for spending a hundred million dollars in fiscal year 1980 to create a solar bank. He asked for additional hundreds of millions to fund solar projects and research, and offered a billion dollars in tax credits to homeowners who wanted to put panels on their roofs or install wind-energy systems. He declared May 3, 1978, to be Sun Day, and delivered a speech (in a driving rain—he was characteristically unlucky) from a federal solar-research facility in Golden, Colorado. “The question is no longer whether solar energy works,” he said. “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.” He continued, “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.”
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.
