Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [93]
Donella Meadows, the famous author of the The Limits to Growth report, argued for deployment near where it was used so that its users would also bear its costs. “The world works a little better any time we manage to make the invisible visible, embed real costs into prices, and impose the consequences of decision-making upon those who make the decisions,” she wrote.11 This is very nearly the opposite of what most technological companies try to do.
And when this heady mix of attitudes was turned on energy, it generated a fascination with solving the needs of heating and cooling one’s shelter without recourse to centralized power systems. Electrical power could be generated right on site with wind or small-scale hydroelectric generators or, by the end of the decade, photovoltaics.
Huge nuclear reactors were the antithesis of the soft and organic and small scale. Built by huge corporations, associated with the military, and supported by an antidemocratic, militarized technocracy in the Atomic Energy Commission (and its descendents), it is not hard to see why being against nuclear was an obvious choice for appropriate technologists. “A minefield of ominous problems awaits the further expansion and international proliferation of nuclear power. These problems—environmental, social, economic, managerial, and regulatory—are at the heart of the nation’s gigantic political tug of war over the future of nuclear energy,” one 1980 environmental reader stated.12
Thus, the idea of “technological progress” came under intense scrutiny. If the narrative of American technology had been triumphant and teleological, an arrow pointing from Pilgrims to Apollo, many rejected the idea that technologies were getting “better.” That had interesting consequences even in areas about which one would have thought appropriate technologists would have been remarkably enthusiastic.
Baldwin, normally pitch-perfect and succinct on why a tool or idea was good or bad, struggled to offer advice about solar photovoltaics. In 1980 he wrote, “I’d wait a year or two.” Although you could get panels, they were “expensive (still) and I keep hearing sad stories of failure.” However, “The price has been coming down fast and continues to fall at a rate that makes me suspect that I’d be owing more on a panel bought today than a brand new one would cost three years hence. Moreover, the photovoltaic business is fraught with breakthroughs and rumored breakthroughs.” The very progress of the technology—that it was not perfect nor timeless—was an issue for Baldwin. “We aren’t there yet,” he almost concluded before admitting, “my own humble abode, an Airstream trailer wired 12 volts, is powered by a modest panel feeding a battery.” Were we there yet or not? Baldwin can’t decide, see-sawing back and forth a half dozen times in just a couple hundred words. Photovoltaics were expensive and changing quickly but they were also conceptually perfect: “simple, quiet, few building code problems, no moving parts, mounted on a wide variety of buildings, potentially mass producible in huge quantities.”
The photovoltaics waffle highlighted everything difficult about the intentionally ambiguous use of the word “tool” in Whole Earth. If a tool was a timeless thing, a photovoltaic panel certainly did not fit the definition. If a tool was a good idea that was a means to a particular kind of lifestyle, a photovoltaic panel certainly was. “I can’t recommend