SOLAR TODAY
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009
VOL. 23, No. 1
It’s not too late for the United States to help lead the world
into a carbon-free solar era, but it will take national
commitment on the scale seen during World War II.
DENIS HAYES | President, Bullitt Foundation
Following decades of denial of climate
science by the political establishment,
President-elect Obama will take office
in a nation that lags behind Europe and Japan
in establishing the building blocks for a carbon-neutral future. Once the world leader in
renewable energy, America has ceded its place
to nations whose governments have made the
transition to low-carbon energy a priority.
As a candidate, Barack Obama asserted
his intention to promote renewable energy,
boost energy efficiency, combat climate
change, reduce our dependence on foreign
oil and create green jobs. Unfortunately, a
doubled national debt was the last and most
urgent of many disastrous Bush legacies with
which the new president must cope. The more
than $10 trillion we now owe our children
and other nations has too many digits to fit
on the “debt clock” in Times Square, and the
melt-down of the financial sector threatens a
global depression.
Those of us who, for the last 30 years, have
urged sweeping changes in the nation’s energy
posture have always understood the power
of the interests aligned against change. We
were challenging the oil, coal, electric utility
and automobile industries, all of which were
profiting handsomely from the status quo. We
thought we needed crisis — an energy “Pearl
Harbor” or energy “Sputnik” — to mobilize
the public behind such a far-reaching change.
It might take the form of a war in the Middle
East, a Chernobyl meltdown, an Exxon Val-dez. But these crises came and went without
producing a discernable improvement in national energy policy.
Instead, the opportunity now has come in
an unexpected form: a financial system that
requires trillions of dollars of investment
in order to avoid collapse, coupled with the
election of a new president with unusual
intelligence, a willingness to take a fresh look
at everything, a House and Senate dominated
by his political party, and a robust mandate
for change.
The most effective way to avoid a long,
deep, worldwide recession is huge expenditures on green investments, putting millions
of unemployed people back to work. For example, President-elect Obama could sensibly
spend $6,000 per house increasing the energy
efficiency of 50 million homes. He has already
expressed interest in constructing a smart grid
— training hundreds of thousands to replace
the wave of retiring baby boomer linemen
whose departures so worry the utility industry.
A recipient of the Charles Greeley Abbot Award
and a Fellow of the American Solar Energy
Society, Denis Hayes chairs the ASES Board of
Trustees. He is president of the Bullitt Foundation and chair emeritus of the International Earth
Day Network. During the Carter administration,
Hayes was director of the federal Solar Energy
Research Institute. This article draws heavily
on Hayes’ article published in June in the online
magazine Yale Environment 360, e360.yale.edu.
DAVE RABOIN/ ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
If the federal government agrees to invest $50
billion to bail out Detroit, it should demand
that the ailing industry retool for dramatic increases in fuel efficiency and retraining of au-toworkers and mechanics to understand the
new technologies.
Most important, we need a national commitment to solar and renewable energy comparable to our mobilization for World War II,
when the United States unleashed its scientific creativity and its industrial power to support the war effort. We need Jimmy Carter’s
“moral equivalent of war.”
Any serious program to limit greenhouse gas
emissions has to cap carbon at the 2,000 places
where it enters the U.S. economy — not the
millions of places where it leaves our smokestacks and tailpipes.
