Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [55]
The environmental damage that the mill did was real and noticeable, Hayes recalled, but so were the economic imperatives that drove it. Hayes related,
Growing up, this simply seemed to be fate. Paper mills produced acidic fumes. That was a natural part of the industrial process to free up the cellulose from the lignin in the wood so that the fibers could be made into paper. All paper mills stank. Society needed paper; Camas needed jobs. The smell was “the smell of prosperity.” As I grew older and learned a little bit about science and economics, I understood that “fate” is merely the sum of a large number of decisions made by people in authority who were trying to minimize their costs and maximize their profits.30
He went on to explain that he learned that if environmentalists wanted to clean up that one mill, “we would have to clean up the whole industry.” 31 It was a lesson that would stick with him: Something as specific as the distinctive aroma of his hometown actually had national causes and implications.
After graduating from Camas High, he got an associate’s degree at the local junior college, Clark College. He is by far the most high-profile alumnus the school has ever produced. Then he took the unlikely step of gaining admission to Stanford, where he became a powerful political leader, winning the student body presidency in that tumultuous year, 1968.
Two years later Senator Gaylord Nelson appointed Hayes one of the organizers of Earth Day and, quite suddenly, he became one of the more well-known environmental leaders in the country.32 He had gained the national platform that he believed was necessary to effect real change. For the next eight years he wrote extensively, worked for environmental organizations, and founded the Solar Lobby in Washington, DC.
Then, after Schlesinger returned from the Middle East, he asked Bishop to arrange a lunch between Hayes and himself. “To our mutual astonishment, we quite liked each other,” Hayes remembered.
Rappaport continued to struggle at SERI, as solar energy gained increasing prominence. Eventually, Schlesinger picked Hayes to lead the Institute. No other director of SERI or the National Renewable Energy Lab has ever come close to matching Hayes’s record as an impassioned advocate for solar energy as both an idea and a set of technologies.
With a new leader at the helm and the 1979 energy shock pushing energy back up the political agenda, SERI morale began to return. In the fiscal year 1980 they had $131 million and a plan to spend it: They were going to systematically drive down the cost of the major renewable energy technologies. By making solar power cheaper, they would transform the relationship between society and its energy sources. Hayes recollected,
In 1980, if you looked at what was going on with solar energy and what was going on with computers, you could be pretty confident that America was facing a revolution but it wasn’t a computer revolution. There was no Microsoft. There was nothing. Desktop computers could be used for advanced typewriting, some accounting and playing games, whereas on the other hand, on the energy field, we had a huge national enterprise with this research going on in multiple laboratories.33
The organization’s institutional plan from fiscal year 1981 looked five years ahead and reflects Hayes’s hopes and priorities. Photovoltaics got $38 million, more than twice as much money as any other technology, and its budget was predicted to keep growing. Solar thermal power research also received more than $10 million. Wind and biomass, though they received substantial