humanity is heading toward an iceless age.
Others say that the bounds of uncertainty are wider, the knowledge of how climate works is less developed, and that fluctuations have always characterized the weather. Some also believe that the target of 450 parts per million is unrealistic, as is the possibility for a speedy transition from fossil fuels, which together currently provide about 80 percent of the world’s total energy.
Yet whatever the debates over science and policy, the elevation of climate change and the effort to regulate CO2 are transforming energy policy and markets, stimulating investment, and starting a torrent of technological research. All this is giving a great new boost to the drive for greater energy efficiency, low-carbon or even carbon-free energy—and for the rebirth of renewables.
PART FIVE
New Energies
27
REBIRTH OF RENEWABLES
It was the first and only press conference ever held on top of the White House. On June 20, 1979, President Carter, along with his wife, Rosalynn, tramped up onto the roof, entourage and press in tow, in order to dedicate a solar hot water–heater system. “No one can ever embargo the sun,” Carter declared. He put the system’s cost at $28,000 but quickly added that the investment would pay for itself in seven to ten years, given high energy prices. “A generation from now,” he said, this solar heater could be “a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people . . . harnessing the power of the sun.” Or, he said, it could be “a curiosity, a museum piece.”
And there, standing on the White House roof, he set a grand goal: that the United States would get 20 percent of its energy from solar by the year 2000. He promised to spend $1 billion over the next year to get the initiative going.1
By the time of Carter’s 1979 press conference, the idea that the world needed to transition to what was then called solar energy (and later renewables) had already become a clear trend in energy thinking. The Arab oil embargo earlier that decade, and the then unfolding Iranian Revolution, brought not only disruption in petroleum supplies but also grave fears about the future of world oil. All that combined with a sharpening environmental consciousness to make solar and renewable energy the natural solution. It was clean and it provided stability. And it would never run out. In Washington, incentives were wheeled into place to jump-start a renewable industry. Research dollars started to flow. Technologists, big companies, small companies, entrepreneurs, activists, and enthusiasts were all getting into the solar game.
But nothing like 20 percent happened. Instead what followed this initial burst of enthusiasm were decades of disappointment, disillusionment, bankruptcies, and sheer stagnation. It was only in the late 1990s that the industry, by then established in Japan and Germany with strong government support, began to revive in the United States, and only around 2004–5 that it started to gain real scale. Even as late as 2010, renewables accounted for only 8 percent of the U.S. energy supply—about the same share it had in 1980. Remove two items—hydropower (which has been constant for many years) and biomass (primarily ethanol)—and renewables in 2009 constituted less than 1.5 percent of the total U.S. energy supply. Much the same holds true around the world.
Yet today renewables are reenergized to become a growing part of energy supply, embraced as a key solution to the triple challenges of energy supply, security, and climate change. China’s President Hu Jintao said that China must “seize preemptive opportunities in the new round of the global energy revolution.” The European Union has gone further, with a 20 percent renewable goal for 2020. “I want us to be the greenest government ever,” declared British prime minister David Cameron, promising “the most dramatic change in our energy policy since the advent of nuclear energy.” In 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel set a new target for Germany—to move renewables’ share of electricity from 17 percent in 2011 to 35 percent by 2020.
More than any other president before him, Barack Obama has invested his administration in remaking the energy system and driving it toward a renewable foundation. Indeed, he has raised the stakes in renewable energy to the level of national destiny. “The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources,” he said, “will be the nation that leads the twenty-first-century global economy.” Both companies and investors now see renewables as a large and growing part of the huge global energy market.2
Yet