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solar power
'Nobody Can Embargo Sunlight': Jimmy Carter and the US Solar Revolution That Wasn't
Why didn't we listen? We could so easily have listened.
Jan 07, 2025
As Jimmy Carter is laid to rest this week, I think it’s worth paying attention to just exactly how out front he was on solar energy.
Driven by both the upheaval of the OPEC embargoes and the lingering echoes of Earth Day at the start of the 1970s, and with “Limits to Growth” and “Small is Beautiful” as two of the decade’s big bestsellers (Carter had a reception for E.F. Schumacher at the White House!), the administration decided that solar was the way out. (The idea of the greenhouse effect was beginning to be talked about in these circles too, but it wasn’t yet a public idea, and it wasn’t driving policy).
Everyone knows about the solar panels on the White House roof, but that was the least of it. Jimmy Carter, in his 1980 budget, pledged truly serious cash for solar research, and for building out panels on roofs across America. “Nobody can embargo sunlight,” he said in his most important speech, from the government’s mountaintop solar energy lab in Golden, Colorado. “No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters.” Carter—with characteristic bad luck—was giving this speech outside in a driving rainstorm, not the backdrop his handlers had hoped for. But he was resolute. “The question is no longer whether solar energy works,” he said. “We know it works. The only question is how to cut costs.”
Reagan took the solar panels off the White House, but again that was the least of it.
His goal, he said, was to have America getting a quarter of its power from the sun by the year 2000. And that was almost certainly an achievable goal—the history of it is that when you pour money on panels, they get better and cheaper fast. The money finally came from Germany, with its feed-in tariffs, which subsidized the development of low-cost Chinese panel manufacturing beginning around 2005. But that was a quarter century after what might have been, had we listened to Carter.
Just for kicks, here’s John Hall and Carly Simon singing about the “warm power of the sun” outside the Capitol in 1979. (If you look really closely, you can’t see me, but I was there). I think the movement probably made a mistake spending as much time opposing nuclear as backing solar—but opposing is easier, it must be said.
"Power-No Nukes" concert with Carly Simon
Anyway, of course, we listened to Reagan, with his siren song about ‘morning in America,’ and his version of ‘drill baby drill,’ and we went ever deeper down into the hydrocarbon hell we now inhabit. Reagan took the solar panels off the White House, but again that was the least of it. The real problem was that he slashed federal research funding to the bone. Tens of thousands of people in the nascent solar industry lost their jobs; a generation disappeared.
In fact, it’s only now that we’re getting back to where we were. The Inflation Reduction Act will forever be Biden’s signal achievement, even if he and Harris never figured out how to talk about it (and didn’t even really try during the fall campaign). But it’s done what Carter envisioned—jumpstarted the future. And if you want a musical tribute (not quite John Hall and Carly Simon, but pretty good anyway), check out this video about the DOE’s Loan Program Office, which—under the inspired leadership of Jigar Shah—has been at the absolute center of the IRA rollout:
Now, of course, the Trump administration is going to try and do what the Reagan administration did in the 1980s—slow down the transition to clean energy, at the behest of their friends in Big Oil. Trump’s a true believer—he told the British government last week that they should take down the wind turbines in the North Sea and drill for more oil instead. Biden got the final word here, though—in one of his last acts, he put an awful lot of the U.S. coast off-limits to drilling and in ways that won’t be easy for the next guys to undo.
The administration will still do serious damage, of course, but it’s possible that it won’t be as fatal as the last time around. For one, the energy revolution is now global, and so even if the U.S. lags, China will drive the planet forward. For another, the IRA has two years under its belt already, and so there’s lots of money already out there, lots of it in unusual places. (The biggest solar panel factory in the western hemisphere is in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district). The GOP has announced they’d like to cut $700 billion in clean energy funding to help pay for a $5 trillion tax cut—we’ll see how the politics shakes out.
The GOP has announced they’d like to cut $700 billion in clean energy funding to help pay for a $5 trillion tax cut—we’ll see how the politics shakes out.
But the biggest reason is that the movement of people who care about the future know what happened last time, and we will do our best. Some of that will mean trying to keep IRA money funding through the Republican Congress; much of it will mean figuring out how to celebrate sun and windpower, and make them ever easier to install at the state, local, and street level. That’s much of what we’ll be working on at this newsletter in the year ahead—for now, I’ll just tell you to keep the weekend of the autumnal equinox (Sept 21) free on your calendar.
And also just a reminder, as the press reports on the funeral of the pious and extremely good Baptist peanut farmer (all of which is true) that the 70s were also kind of cool. I mean, Carly Simon! And that White House roof, where the solar panels were? That’s where Willie Nelson smoked a large joint after an Oval Office visit. Jimmy, we will miss you—you were a great ex-president, but a great president too. If only we’d listened.
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A Trio of Small Christmas Gifts to Stave Off Climate Despair
From solar-powered data centers and balconies to a landmark legal victory, I hope these help set the holiday mood just a little.
Dec 24, 2024
One of my jobs in the tiny Vermont town where I live is to lead the Christmas Eve service at the little white church alongside the river. I’m not actually a preacher, and it’s not particularly denominational—my wife and my daughter, who are Jewish, are usually on hand to belt out carols and there’s occasionally a reading from Dr. Seuss. But the neighbors stand at the pulpit one by one to recite the Scriptures that tell the story of this remarkable baby, and then I do my best in a short homily to pick out some points of light. A little harder this year than most, but perhaps more important because of that. The goal is to make sure the community holds, now more than ever.
And I suppose that in some way the community we’ve built around this newsletter is a congregation of sorts, with me again in the role of shambling, ill-trained preacher. So I’ve poked around in the news to bring you a trio of small gifts—ambiguous, by no means definitive, but nonetheless things to build on.
The first comes, somewhat remarkably, from Silicon Valley.
As you almost certainly know, the rapid growth of AI is causing despair among some energy experts. The giant data centers that “train” these various models to do what they do (help lazy students write banal termpapers, say) soak up huge amounts of electricity, and in the last year or two the fossil fuel industry has seized on that as avidly as they seized on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—anything to make the case for extending their business model a little longer. Arielle Samuelson, writing at Emily Atkin’s pathbreaking newsletter Heated, offers a really powerful account of what’s gone on:
The growth of AI has been called the “savior” of the gas industry. In Virginia alone, the data center capital of the world, a new state report found that AI demand could add a new 1.5 gigawatt gas plant every two years for 15 consecutive years.
And now, as energy demand for AI rises, oil corporations are planning to build gas plants that specifically serve data centers. Last week, Exxon announced that it is building a large gas plant that will directly supply power to data centers within the next five years. The company claims the gas plant will use technology that captures polluting emissions—despite the fact that the technology has never been used at a commercial scale before.
Chevron also announced that the company is preparing to sell gas to an undisclosed number of data centers. “We're doing some work right now with a number of different people that's not quite ready for prime time, looking at possible solutions to build large-scale power generation,” said CEO Mike Wirth at an Atlantic Council event. The opportunity to sell power to data centers is so promising that even private equity firms are investing billions in building energy infrastructure.
So, ugh. Except that it’s important to remember that Big Oil is an industry that lies a lot, and some of those commitments may not be quite as firm as they’re saying. In fact, a new report—this is the first Christmas present—from a team of Silicon Valley types came out last week, making the case that if these data centers are actually going to get built anytime soon, the best bet by far is for Google et al to put up solar farms next door. Building new gas plants, as they point out, takes a number of years—really, anything that requires a new connection to the grid goes slowly. But if you have a “co-located microgrid”—i.e., a dedicated solar farm right next to your mysterious warehouse of servers—that can be put up in a relative trice.
Estimated time to operation for a large off-grid solar microgrid could be around two years (1-2 years for site acquisition and permitting plus 1-2 years for site buildout), though there’s no obvious reason why this couldn’t be done faster by very motivated and competent builders.
The only one of the authors I knew before this was Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist employed by the payment company Stripe, but the others come from reputable places (Paces, which expedites renewable development, and Scale Microgrids) and they thank a passel of collaborators at places like Tesla and Anthropic. And their research seems impeccable—they work through the costs and the reliability of renewables paired with batteries, and they return again and again to the speed with which these new facilities could be built.
One thing they don’t stress, but which I think could be politically important, is that all of these big AI players have promised in recent years that they would zero out their emissions. And though no one in the White House will hold them to that, most of these companies are in places like Washington and California filled with environmentally committed workers and investors; we should be able to organize some pressure on them to do the right thing. It’s not the perfect thing. In a rational world we’d postpone the glories of AI long enough to power up all the heat pumps and cars from renewable electricity first. But if they get expertise building solar farms for their data centers, the experience may turn these behemoths into better crusaders for clean energy. One can hope, anyway. Here’s the final bottom line from the report:
Off-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the U.S. Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives… The advantages to whoever moves on this quickly could be substantial.
And then there’s the second present I promised, which was delivered Wednesday afternoon by the Montana Supreme Court. It upheld, on a 6-1 vote, a lower court ruling that the state’s children have a “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment,” and that that includes carefully analyzing state energy policies to keep them from damaging the climate.
This ruling is under the state constitution, which was amended shortly after Earth Day in 1970 to include environmental protections. (America’s Western states have not always been bright red). The landmark ruling comes almost a year and a half after a remarkable trial, which featured a mix of young Montanans explaining how climate change was damaging their lives (breathing wildfire smoke, for one) and nationally renowned climate experts who volunteered their time to make a compelling case. The state all but punted its response, not even putting its lead climate-denier on the stand after paying her large sums of money to prepare testimony, and the district court issued a powerful finding that’s now been upheld.
This doesn’t necessarily have national implications—shamefully, the Biden DOJ has buried the federal equivalent, Juliana v. U.S., under a blizzard of writs, picking up where the Trump administration left off. And it probably won’t immediately change Montana’s current commitment to using more gas. But it is a clear moral victory that will cast a long shadow. As Cornell legal scholar Leehi Yona said this morning, “This is a historic case and one that could serve as a model for state-level lawsuits, particularly as an alternative to federal courts (such as the U.S. Supreme Court, which currently seems unreceptive to climate cases).”
Mostly, I’m happy for the kids involved. I got to interview a couple of them on stage this fall at a gathering sponsored by Protect Our Winters. They were eloquent and moving, and I hope very much that this ruling strengthens their commitment to fight. The Trump era will end someday, and we’ll need a new wave of smart and moral people to carry on the crucial fights—these are them!
And the third? Attentive readers will remember how happy I was earlier this year at news that half a million Germans had taken advantage of a new law to hang solar panels from the balconies of their apartments. Well, according to a new report in The Guardian, by year’s end that number has swelled to a million and a half Germans, and now it’s taking off in Spain and elsewhere.
Manufacturers say that installing a couple of 300-watt panels will give a saving of up to 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill. With an outlay of €400-800 and with no installation cost, the panels could pay for themselves within six years.
In Spain, where two thirds of the population live in apartments and installing panels on the roof requires the consent of a majority of the building’s residents, this DIY technology has obvious advantages.
With solar balconies, no such consent is required unless the facade is listed as of historic interest or there is a specific prohibition from the residents’ association or the local authority. Furthermore, as long as the installation does not exceed 800 watts it doesn’t require certification, which can cost from €100 to €400, depending on the area.
“The beauty of the solar balconies is they are flexible, cheap, and plug straight into the domestic network via a converter, so you don’t have to pay for the installation,” says Santiago Vernetta, CEO of Tornasol Energy, one of Spain’s main suppliers.
Putting up one of these would be illegal almost everywhere in America—but that’s something to work on next year. Why should Europeans have all the fun? Belgium has just ended its ban. As one official explained: “If 1.5 million Germans have bought solar balcony kits there must be something in it,” he says.
I wish I had yet more such gifts to offer (I’m keeping a close eye on Albany, where Gov. Kathy Hochul may still sign the crucial Climate Superfund bill before year’s end, and if that happens I’ll let you know). But I hope these help set the holiday mood just a little. I can tell you that it’s snowing this afternoon up here on the spine of the Greens. And since I’m typing up the program for the Christmas Eve service this afternoon, I can tell you how it ends: with everyone in town walking through the church doors and into the (hopefully crisp) night air singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”
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Hey America, the Fossil Fuel Industry Is Trying to Tell You What to Do
It’s time for the climate movement to speak to the nation’s inner teenager and persuade it that renewable energy is the true energy of freedom.
Nov 18, 2024
Since so much that is bizarre is currently being normalized (Matt Gaetz, in an effort to get out of Congress before it could publish its report on his sex scandals, is taking a new job as… attorney general) let me just say that the strangest thing of all remains in plain view. The incoming president of the richest country on Earth believes climate change—the deepest challenge that our species has faced—is a hoax.
This obviously has endless policy implications, which we’ll spend the next four years working through—but the simple fact is what’s so amazing. Every single one of the structures we’ve built over the centuries to help us understand the world, from the National Academy of Science to the land-grant universities with their huge labs, to NASA with its satellites keeping an eye on planet Earth, have told us the same thing: Fairly simple physics means that burning fossil fuel is warming the Earth, a warming now painfully confirmed in rainfall totals, melting ice, rising sea level, and deadly heatwaves. The entire world is plunging into an inferno.
And yet the person at the putative head of that entire pyramid of reason and evidence, the person with instant access to any scientist on Earth, and the person with the power to do the most to prevent it, simply rejects it. Jaded as we are, that should stun us.
Oil companies are a scam, pushing antiquated technology to keep you hooked. They don’t care if you breathe dirty air as long as it makes them money.
It’s not news, of course. President-elect Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords last time around, and he will soon do so again. He’s busy finding allies—the first foreign leader to visit Mar-a-Lago post election was Argentina’s Javier Milei, a libertarian beloved by far-right leaders around the world, who joined Trump in doing the YMCA dance (the picture of authoritarian leaders bouncing to a gay anthem is one of the few saving graces of the moment). Milei announced that he too thought climate change was a “socialist lie” and hinted that Argentina too would soon be leaving the Paris pact. Even the host of the current global climate talks, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev (named as “Corruption’s Person of the Year” in 2012 by a global NGO) used his opening address last week to explain that fossil fuels were “a gift from the god.” (Climate activists, an unpopular species in Azerbaijan, were prevented from chanting at the global talks, so they hummed)
Obviously the underlying motive for all of this is the wealth and power associated with fossil fuels. (The country of Fossil Fuel Lobbyists sent more representatives to the climate talks than almost any other). Trump on Friday appointed a fracking executive, Christopher Wright, as his new energy secretary, surprising absolutely no one. Wright of course rejects the idea that there is a climate crisis, that we need an energy transition, or that there is any such thing as clean energy.
But he goes further, and in a way that I think helps illuminate how the right gets away with its denial. He tweeted recently that following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the “left” needed a new “north star.”
Enter climate change. The solution to top-down control’s existential challenge came in the form of problem. The climate “problem” fit the bill perfectly. It was global and centered on the two core industries of society, energy and agriculture. It was crowned “existential” by alarmist activists, and left-of-center politicians fell in line.
And here, for me, is the key part. Wright says that the core view of the left is that
those uneducated rubes (the citizenry) surely can’t be left free to exercise their own preferences through purchasing and employment decisions.
I have no idea how Argentine politics works, and I imagine that Azerbaijani politics mainly involves staying on the right side of Mr. Corruption, but I get American politics well enough to recognize the power of Wright’s worldview. There’s always been in our character a strain of “You’re Not the Boss of Me.” (Indeed, I spent my boyhood giving tours of Lexington Green where this attitude had its first real expression). But for much of my life it was a fairly fringe part of our discourse: Long before RFK Jr, for instance, there were oddball right-wing opponents of fluoride in our water supply, or of making motorcyclists wear helmets.
But most of us aren’t motorcyclists interested in traumatic brain injury, nor conspiracy theorists eager to increase our dental bills. So things like that stayed on the fringe—the changes demanded by, say, seatbelts were so small and so obviously beneficial that we just got used to them, and there was no real cost to any industry big enough to matter.
Climate change was a different matter. Taking it seriously would require enormous change from one group of people—those who made fortunes in coal and oil and gas. (Wright’s aptly-named Liberty Energy fracks one-fifth of the onshore wells in America). So the mere fact that science has demonstrated we’re wrecking the Earth with fossil fuel couldn’t be allowed to dictate policy—something that became more likely as the alternatives became cheaper and easier.
The easiest way to marshal opposition was to lean on this tired trope: Someone who thought you were a ‘rube’ was trying to tell you what to do. Trump, of course, goes on repeated diatribes about people being forced to use windpower and then being unable to watch tv because the breeze has dropped, or forced to buy an electric car that only runs when the sun has shining. Though no one has ever proposed banning gas stoves, the mere fact that scientists were pointing out its dangers to the lungs of children was enough to turn on the machine. The Texas representative Ronny Jackson tweeted, with his usual restraint:
I'll NEVER give up my gas stove. If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!
and his Senate colleague Ted Cruz chimed in
The Biden administration is waging a multifaceted attack on popular appliances.
This kind of ‘thinking’ was supercharged by Covid-19—instead of appreciating the difficulties posed by a novel virus (or remembering the piles of dead bodies in the early months), lots of Americans pouted. Someone was telling them not to do something (eat in a crowded restaurant) or to do something (cover their mouths). So they rebelled; absent that anger, I doubt a January 6 could have happened.
I think this strain in our national character is wrongheaded—the danger of authoritarianism in America has always come from the right, not the left, and never more so than now. I devoutly wish that affection for one’s neighbors and a love of the generations that will come after us would persuade us to make the not-very-hard changes required of us. But I don’t think those reasons will be sufficient—they’re not strong enough to override the constant chatter about “mandates” pressed by the fossil fuel industry and its media and political harem.
So we have to broaden the appeal of the things that could save us. In the next few years the main task of the environmental movement in America (because so many other options are foreclosed) is going to involve pushing for a rapid transition to clean and renewable energy. We’re going to have to persuade people that solar and wind energy, and the devices that go with it, are what we want. And it won’t do sufficient good to argue on environmental grounds—“you’re not the boss of me” is a teenager’s argument, and teenagers are focused on themselves. So we better be too.
Here’s some of the arguments, then, that we can spend more time on. (And this is not theoretical—we’ll be rolling out the plans to make these arguments scale, as movements adjust to the new political reality).
Solar power is cheaper. (and those who oppose it know so, and are conspiring to make sure you keep paying them for energy when the sun provides it for free)
It’s more reliable. (and you can plug your EV to your house after a hurricane and run everything for a week).
It’s the ultimate liberty to have your own powerplant on your roof.
It’s far better to have a wind farm in your county than to rely on Saudi Arabia (or Chris Wright).
An electric car goes zero to 60 far faster than your antiquated gas model, and it costs half as much to run. (Rich guys in their Teslas are laughing at you)
Because it has fewer moving parts, you don’t have to visit your mechanic nearly as often. You can drive right by the gas station.
Oil companies are a scam, pushing antiquated technology to keep you hooked. They don’t care if you breathe dirty air as long as it makes them money.
Their shareholders are getting rich while you pay for repairing roads and bridges everytime there’s a new climate disaster.
We’ve already reached the percentage of the population that cares deeply about carbon emissions, and we obviously need more. We need to understand the darker sides of the American brain as well as the lighter ones, and we need to play to them.
So remember: If you have some solar panels and a heat pump and an EV, you’re the boss of you. Pass it on.
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