Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [75]
In short, the relationships between ecosystems, economies, energy, and technology became unstable. Sitting in the famed gasoline lines waiting to fill up their tanks, Americans of all stripes were forced to think more about where their fuel came from than they had in half a century. Many came up with some tremendously weird, inventive, and productive ideas. Most of the “new” policies and technologies bouncing around America in the first decade of the twenty-first century are milquetoast variants of the radical reexaminations of the country that occurred during the 1970s.
Yet in popular memory this great outpouring of intellectual energy has been caricatured and reduced to cartoon hippies playing with old windmills. However, there was much, much more to the era. Everyone had a plan for fixing the way the country used heat, light, and power. Like the raucous panoply of 1840s reformers responding to industrialization, the American energy system got its own constellation of would-be helpers, as the seeds planted back then bore decidedly strange fruit 130 years later.
Government and university energy specialists issued report after report, many pushing for large-scale projects like nuclear reactors that yielded more radioactive fuel than you put into them (“breeders”) and synthetic fuel plants that converted coal into knock-off crude. Foundations convened large groups to discuss American energy: With a couple of exceptions, their sturdy, dour reports are like the existential opposite of coffee-table books. Formerly obscure researchers held conferences on “Energy Transitions” and argued about odd things like the return of feudalism as an unintended consequence of increased solar energy usage.9 Thermodynamics, a musty old nineteenth-century science, was suddenly on the lips of physicists like Art Rosenfeld, who had formerly been more interested in quarks and gluons.10 Ecologist Howard Odum put out books seriously suggesting apportioning UN votes “in proportion to the energy budget” of a country, including its haul from the sun and fuels.11 Barry Commoner, an eco-socialist, published popular books attacking capitalism as the root of the environmental, energy, and economic crises racking the country. These were widely acclaimed by the mainstream media. The environmental movement figured out how to use bureaucratic levers to delay and block the building of power plants. Rodale Press, an early imprint for information on organic food, began to branch out into alternative energy. Magazines like Not Man Apart, CoEvolution Quarterly, Clear Creek, and Mother Jones came into being and emphasized deep environmental and energy issues.
While in a 2006 New York Times article, then-president of the Solar Energy Industries Association Rhone Resch declared, “We’re not just hippies in garages in Berkeley anymore,” the truth is that the people interested in alternative energy have never been “just hippies in garages in Berkeley.” The roots of green technology spread wider and deeper. The choices society was mulling over during the 1970s were more nuanced than commonly assumed or misremembered. The technological ideas available were not simply buckydomes and solar hot water heaters on one side versus huge nuclear and dirty coal power plants on the other. There were branches and gradients running from tripped out solar home owners through the Amory Lovins’s soft path and energy efficiency all the way to the grand solar farms of Aden and Marjorie Meinel.
There were so many interesting things going on during the 1970s that it would be impossible to cover them all even within