Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [79]
Although we don’t recognize them as such, they are the unsung architects of our current system, and in 1974 most of them knew almost nothing about the energy business.
ART ROSENFELD AND THE INVASION OF THE PHYSICISTS
On a sweltering Monday in July of 1974, a remarkable month-long seminar of renegade physicists began on the finely manufactured landscape of Princeton University. Where Einstein had walked the gently curving pathways and the nation’s elite learned how to pull the levers of power and money, a small group under the auspices of the American Physical Society came together to figure out how to solve the energy crisis engulfing America. Their ideas, policy prescriptions, and actions challenged the technical authority of the nation’s largest energy companies and set the nation, led by California, on an energy path that would not have been possible without their contributions.
They forced redesigns of refrigerators, air conditioners, utility rate structures, assembly lines, and engineering culture. Most fundamentally, they broke the psychological link that generations had made between increased levels of fossil-fuel use and economic growth. It is almost impossible to overstate the impact that they have had in shaping the way people think about concepts like “energy efficiency” today, and yet when that summer session of the American Physical Society began, most knew little about the industrial and bureaucratic structures that they would soon be advising and critiquing.12
It didn’t take long for the big brains gathered at Princeton to make their impact felt at the national level. Their ideas and credentials had such power that within two years, Arthur Rosenfeld of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was regularly testifying before Congress on energy-related issues. He often argued that utilities were overestimating future demand and that simple energy efficiency programs could supply Americans with all the heat, light, and power they needed—and save them money to boot.
Rosenfeld and other luminaries, like Princeton’s Robert Socolow, had convened the summer session in response to the first energy shock of the postwar period, the OPEC oil embargo that led to gas rationing and a general crisis among the population. “It took us about two days to discover that the real answer was that in the U.S. energy was dirt cheap and things that are dirt cheap get treated like dirt,” Rosenfeld recalled recently.13
Americans were shocked and dismayed, but the range of basic responses was fairly limited and straightforward: Get more oil domestically, get OPEC to call off the dogs, or simply use less oil. The OPEC-American standoff was international politics at their most intense, but it did not require the entire world to work together to solve the problem.
Most conventional energy analysts recommended simply producing more oil and building more power plants. The nation’s petroleum resources, Alaska included, seemed unlikely to yield huge quantities of petroleum in perpetuity, so some suggested turning coal into liquid fuel, just as the Germans had during World War II. This thinking eventually led to the creation of the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, known as one of the bigger government boondoggles in American history.14 But the standard analysis suggested that without more energy inputs, economic growth would be difficult to sustain. Utility executives and energy analysts argued that for twenty-five years, energy use and gross national product had walked in lockstep.
But the physicists didn’t see things that way. They saw merely correlation, not causality, and they did not buy the arguments then in vogue, which called for huge numbers of new power plants or, later, establishing the Synthetic Fuels Corporation to make liquids from coal.