industry research partnerships on a wide variety of technological ventures, and pushed through bureaucratic changes in government research institutes.14
THE “BUREAUCRAT-NOVELIST”
After the first oil crisis eased, Ikeguchi pulled his manuscript out of the drawer and in 1975 published it as Yudan! The title can be translated as “Cut Off!” or more evocatively, “Starvation in Winter!” It became a huge best-seller—over a million copies. Ikeguchi became famous. Thereafter he was much better known by his pen name Taichi Sakaiya. Highly prolific, he continued to publish books, ranging from an enormously influential treatise called The Knowledge-Value Revolution, which presaged today’s information economy, to a four-volume historical novel on Genghis Khan. One Japanese publication described his “unique position” as “bureaucrat-novelist.” When the second oil crisis hit in 1979, he was recruited to establish an entire new bureaucracy—the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, NEDO. With a dedicated budget and staff, NEDO continued to propel Japanese research on renewables, even when the rest of the world, including the United States it seemed, had lost interest.
“I thought that the age of oil was over,” recalled Sakaiya. “It was the age of the knowledge revolution.”15
After a flirtation with geothermal—partly abandoned because many of these resources were in environmentally sensitive areas—MITI turned to solar energy. Japan’s experience with semiconductors was applicable to the manufacture of solar cells, as silicon was the main building block for both. It appeared to the Japanese government that there was some chance of making solar photovoltaics competitive as a source of primary energy if costs could be cut massively.
The solar market took off, fueled by large government subsidies that helped consumers purchase solar panels, along with the most expensive domestic electricity rates in the world, plummeting costs, efficiencies of scale, and increased competition. Led by such companies as Sharp, Kyocera, and Sanyo, Japan was by the beginning of this century the world’s dominant solar manufacturer.
The original MITI vision that Taichi Sakaiya had articulated—of creating a new knowledge-based industry with strong export potential—seemed to be on the cusp of realization. But by then the renewable mandate was passing to another country.
FEEDING INTO GERMANY
It was drilled into the East German guards at the Berlin Wall that their prime mission, above all else, was to keep their fellow citizens from crossing from communist East Berlin into democratic West Berlin. Over the course of 1989 they had become increasingly jumpy. The Soviet grip on Eastern Europe was weakening, and the Berlin Wall was the front line in the East-West stand-off. Any East German attempting to breach the wall risked being shot dead on the spot by the border guards.
But on the night of November 9, 1989, after an ambiguous message by the East German leadership during a televised press conference, hundreds of thousands of East Berliners surged toward the wall, expecting it to come down, demanding that it be opened. Confused and uncertain, the guards hesitated, but finally did allow the wall to open, changing the course of history. People poured across the border. The division of Germany was over, as soon would be the Cold War itself.
Thereafter, the entire nation was to be preoccupied with reunification—the difficult incorporation of a ramshackle, dilapidated East Germany into a West Germany that had a vastly higher standard of living. Unification would end up a trillion-dollar-plus project.
As their part in reunification, the West German electric utilities focused on integrating East Germany’s power system and modernizing its generation, which was based on a type of coal called lignite. While they were preoccupied with the East, a diverse coalition representing a new kind of movement was stealthily promoting a renewable energy law whose adoption was “almost accidental.” And so, as it turned out, the opening of the Berlin Wall also opened a door that turned Germany into the world’s leader in renewable energy for a decade, and as such, did much to lay the basis for today’s global renewable energy industry.16
At the tip point of this environmental coalition was the Green Party. The Greens had emerged in the late 1970s to protest the environmental degradation that had come with Germany’s economic miracle—polluted rivers, dirty air, and later, of special significance, ecological damage to forests. One thing that unified the entire movement was opposition to nuclear power. The movement also encompassed a New Left, anticapitalist, anti-American strain.
Indeed, what really mobilized the Green movement and helped turn it into a political party was, in the early 1980s, the proposed deployment of new nuclear weapons in Europe and then American missiles in Germany, which