Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [80]
They broke down the “energy services” humans need and want, such as space heating and cooling, light, transportation. If this is what we want, they asked, what’s the minimum energy we could use to supply that? They brought back the science of thermodynamics—the interaction of heat with other forces—and tried to understand the manmade energy system like one might analyze a giant machine. Looking back to that first study, Socolow wrote in 1986,
Such an inquiry establishes thermodynamic minimum energies for the performance of tasks, against which one can compare the actual energy use. Where the discrepancies are large, one concludes, tentatively, that society has not yet been particularly clever about providing the best devices to accomplish the task, and one predicts, again tentatively, that large energy savings will become possible—with no loss of amenity—as technology evolves. Far from seeming like a guide for prediction, the 25-year constancy in the ratio of energy use to GNP struck the summer-study physicists as a testament to the sustained inattention to energy use on the part of the technological community.16
Rosenfeld said at that the time he began the Princeton study, “All I really knew was that the Europeans got along on about half the energy we did.” He, like many particle physicists, had spent time in Europe and knew that his French and Swiss counterparts certainly were not “freezing in the dark,” as the anticonservation bromide went.17 That alone made him suspicious of the grand narratives pushed by the U.S. energy industry.
At the time, Rosenfeld would have been a quite unlikely protagonist in the American energy story. He had helped Luis Alvarez win a Nobel Prize and aided the discovery of the empirical results that led to the formulation of quark theory. He had a comfortable and much-sought-after position at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a scientific Shangri-La, if ever there was one. He could have sat in his office perched in the Berkeley hills overlooking the San Francisco Bay, eating lunch gazing on Strawberry Canyon and carrying out the kind of particle physics to which he had devoted twenty-seven years of his adult life.18
But he didn’t. Rosenfeld and his band of converted physicists like Lawrence Berkeley’s Sam Berman and the University of Michigan’s Marc Ross burst onto the national political scene with analyses that showed how to save Americans money and barrels of oil.
They were just in time.
On the day the Princeton seminar began, Time magazine took out an ad in the New York Times advertising its latest issue on the real crisis facing the country. It wasn’t just the structural problems of energy, inflation, and so forth, but rather it was a problem with the nation’s top tier. In blaring, block letters, the advertisement asked, “Whatever happened to leadership and where are the leaders?” Political leaders from traditional backgrounds seemed unable to provide answers to Americans’ needs and pain amidst the new complexities of a globalizing world. The ad stated, “The decline of leadership is acknowledged by most Americans. Its scarcity is felt in many areas of civic responsibility; its absence is recognized in fields that formerly generated leaders.”19
Countercultural attacks on the traditional civic, corporate, and educational institutions, widely televised, had done serious damage to the credibility of those running the country. Trust in the powers that be plummeted.20 Just after the study in August of that summer, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in what may have been the lowest point of twentieth-century American politics.
Who could be trusted to provide honest answers? Perhaps more importantly, what kind of methodology could be trusted? One answer to Time’s query—and these questions—turned out to be Art Rosenfeld.
As Rosenfeld has approached and then passed his eightieth birthday, thirty-five years into