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up the later successes of green technology and made renewable energy a natural place to turn when energy prices and global warming concern began to rise in the early twenty-first century. We can also say that the psychological and even spiritual territory explored by the solar transcendentalists and tool freaks was important, too. They helped change conceptions of technology as having to be big and technocratic. Many of the themes that they explored, like decentralization and personal empowerment through technology, crop up again in the personal computer revolution, which historian Fred Turner brilliantly shows in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture to have grown, in part, on the substrate of the counterculture.16 More directly, many countercultural energy types grew up and became policy wonks. And their fundamentally different interpretation of the value of fossil fuels and solar energy has informed the political left ever since.

A solar society might not have been realized, but a base of knowledge and a set of institutions were created through which the dream of a more perfect power would rise again.

V.

Innovation and the Future

chapter 21

Google’s RE < C Challenge

COAL IS A FLAMMABLE ROCK. You can put it in a pail and carry it to your house. Or you can pack it into one hundred cargo containers and load it onto a train. It’s plentiful and spread pretty evenly around the world. Take a pound of it. Burn it completely and you would generate ten thousand British thermal units (BTUs) of heat. Dirty and heavy, coal has exactly one thing going for it: price. “The problem however is that for much of the world, coal remains both a cheap and portable (and storable) source of energy,” energy analyst Gregor Macdonald wrote in 2009. “In fact, coal has a nasty habit of pricing itself just below nearly all other energy sources. This is why I’ve called coal a kind of anti-hero.”1

But there are reasons coal is cheap. Economists call them “externalities.” What this means is that a business charges some of its cost to society without having to pay for it. A classic example played out in Chicago and Pittsburgh around the turn of the century. People with coal boilers had a choice: They could burn the soft, smoky bituminous coal or they could pay a little more and burn anthracite coal, which burned more cleanly. If you were a manufacturer trying to maximize your own profits, you picked the soft stuff and let all that soot go up the smoke stack. There were some mitigation technologies available, but they cost money, so you didn’t use them. In a “free” market, you could do what you wanted. But what if your next-door neighbors happened to make or sell textiles? As you maximized your profit burning your cheaper coal, the soot and particulates would pour out onto their linens, ruining their products.

This is a classic example of the problem of pollution for a capitalist society and it was not a hypothetical scenario. City residents around the world organized against the use of soft coal, passing laws and prodding smoke inspectors to do something about the soot belching onto them. They argued that the societal costs of the soft coal exceeded any money that individual soft coal users saved. Chicago’s smoke inspector, F. U. Adams wrote in 1894 that

they insist that its consumption entails an annual damage greater than the difference in cost between soft and hard coal; they declare that the smoke nuisance is a positive menace to the health of citizens, that it has resulted in an alarming increase in throat, lung, and eye diseases. They point to ruined carpets, paintings, fabrics, the soot-besmeared facades of buildings, and to a smoke-beclouded sky, and demand that the Smoke Inspector do his plain duty under the law.2

The point is that manufacturers had every economic incentive to burn the cheaper stuff and it was cheaper precisely because society had to bear some of the cost, a phenomenon that Garrett Hardin first brought to widespread notice in his short 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” “The rational