Category
History
Date
11.13.26
Producer
99PI
ROMAN MARS: It’s June 1979, a pleasantly warm, but by no means hot, summer’s day in the nation’s capital. And Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, is standing on the roof of the West Wing of the White House in a crisp navy suit, surrounded by a scrum of reporters. Behind him are four rows of giant black glass boards glinting in the D.C. sunshine. 
Solar panels. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: Carter was an engineer. He had spent his military career running nuclear reactors on Navy submarines. 
ROMAN MARS: This is journalist turned environmental activist, Bill McKibben. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: He had a serious understanding of technology and thought a lot about energy. 
ROMAN MARS: He had to. In the wake of two devastating oil shocks, oil prices were sky high. And for America, which was consuming about a third of the world’s oil supply at the time, this was a big problem. 
JIMMY CARTER: Today, in directly harnessing the power of the sun, we are taking the energy that God gave us, the most renewable energy that we will ever see, and using it to replace our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels… 
ROMAN MARS: Solar panels, Carter said, could be the solution. 
JIMMY CARTER: There is no longer any question that solar energy is both feasible and also cost-effective… 
ROMAN MARS: After all, this was our own technology. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: Solar power had been invented in the U.S., the first modern solar cell, 1954, at Bell Labs in New Jersey. And there’d been a fair number of hippies kind of pioneering solar power in the ’70s. 
ROMAN MARS: But Jimmy Carter’s panels weren’t the kind you’d be familiar with now. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: These were not photovoltaic panels… 
ROMAN MARS: The kind used to generate electricity. This technology was a little more rudimentary. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: These are solar hot water panels, pretty simple technology, that just runs water through a window pane with a black background and heats it up. 
ROMAN MARS: But they worked.
BILL MCKIBBEN: They’re incredibly effective at providing hot water. They work great. This was what the future was going to look like.
ROMAN MARS: And Carter says all this in a speech on the White House roof that day. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: And he says…
JIMMY CARTER: A generation from now, this solar heater…
BILL MCKIBBEN: “This solar panel can either be a curiosity…”
JIMMY CARTER: A museum piece… 
BILL MCKIBBEN: “An example of a road not taken…” 
JIMMY CARTER: Or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest adventures… 
BILL MCKIBBEN: “Or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest adventures…” 
JIMMY CARTER: Ever undertaken by the American people…
BILL MCKIBBEN: “Ever undertaken by the American people.”
ROMAN MARS: But the panels didn’t even last a generation. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: [CHUCKLES] No, he was literally right that they were, within 20 years, a museum piece. 
ROMAN MARS: That speech would turn out to be incredibly prophetic. Those 32 solar panels would become all but one of the things he said they might: a curiosity, a museum piece, and one of our nation’s most potent and enduring symbols of a road not taken. They were not, at least not yet, a part of a great adventure. Our question in this episode, and it’s kind of a big one, is why? 
This is A History of the United States in 100 Objects. I’m Roman Mars. Today, how a president showed the American people a powerful new technology promising abundant cheap energy and freedom from foreign entanglements and why Americans shrugged. 
When you think solar panels, you probably think renewables, green energy, a part of the fight against man-made climate change. But that wasn’t what Carter saw in them. Not really. When Carter became president in 1977, the country had been facing a serious problem for a number of years. 
CBS NEWS: Good evening. What we’re all worrying about this winter are three main things, getting around, keeping warm, and staying healthy. We don’t know how short we’re going to be on gasoline for the car or fuel for the furnace. All we know is we’re going to be short and we’ll have to get by on less… 
BILL MCKIBBEN: You have to understand that the America Carter inherited had been built on cheap, abundant oil. Beginning in the 1950s with the build out of the federal highway system and the almost unbelievable rate of growth of the American suburb, America turned into a voracious consumer of oil, which made us very vulnerable when the first oil shock came with the first OPEC embargo. 
ROMAN MARS: OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, a coalition of oil-producing nations, including Iran, Venezuela, and the United Arab Emirates, which, acting together, controlled the global supply of oil. OPECs oil embargo in 1973 was a form of retaliation against U.S. foreign policy. And the price of a barrel of crude oil quadrupled as a result. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: We were being held hostage, as people said over and over again. 
ROMAN MARS: Bill remembers seeing the effects firsthand. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: I was very, very young–in my teens–a newspaper reporter in those days. And one of my first jobs was covering these lines of motorists waiting outside gas stations in my small town. 
AP NEWS: You can buy plenty of gas at this power test station on Northern Boulevard in Queens if you don’t mind waiting in line… And waiting… And waiting… And waiting…
BILL MCKIBBEN: One of my jobs was keeping track of the very scant hours that the gas stations were open so we could publish them every day. 
ROMAN MARS: Things got so bad, at the start of 1974, President Nixon signed a law lowering the national highway speed limit to 55 miles an hour in an attempt to save gas. He even briefly considered making it illegal to take pleasure drives on Sundays. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: This was a deep shock to the American system. The thing on which America ran was suddenly in short supply. 
ROMAN MARS: And that’s why it felt so pressing to the incoming Carter administration to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. By 1977, the United States was between oil shocks. There was another one coming in 1979. But there was another problem: shortages of natural gas, compounded by a fiercely cold winter that same year. So, in February 1977, our new president addressed the American people in a TV broadcast. 
JIMMY CARTER: Good evening. Tomorrow will be two weeks since I became president. I’ve spent a lot of time deciding how I can be a good president. This talk, which the broadcast networks have agreed to bring to you, is one of several steps that I will take to keep in close touch with the people of our country, to let you know informally about our plans for the coming months…
ROMAN MARS: Jimmy Carter wasn’t sitting behind the resolute desk. This was a fireside chat, literally FDR style, with the President seated comfortably in a soft chair next to a crackling hearth, wearing a beige cardigan. He looked like someone’s grandpa. I mean, he was someone’s grandpa. And he kind of told Americans to just quit fooling around. 
JIMMY CARTER: All of us must learn to waste less energy… 
ROMAN MARS: It was time to get serious. 
JIMMY CARTER: I realize that many of you have not believed that we really have an energy problem, but this winter has made all of us realize that we have to act. We must face the fact that the energy shortage is permanent. There is no way we can solve it quickly…
ROMAN MARS: Carter says what America needs is a new approach to energy, a whole new policy program. But of course, that’s no simple task. It’s going to take him a while to figure it out. So in the meantime, he needs America–that is all of us–to just ease up a little. And he has some very clear ideas about how to do it. 
JIMMY CARTER: Simply by keeping our thermostats, for instance, at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night, we could save half the current shortage of natural gas…
ROMAN MARS: And maybe, if it’s a little chilly, you know, throw on a cardigan. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: It’s actually quite amazing to go back and listen to it. 
JIMMY CARTER: There’s no way that I or anyone else in the government can solve our energy problems if you are not willing to help…
BILL MCKIBBEN: He’s treating Americans as entirely mature human beings and saying, “Look, we’re using way too much of this stuff, and it’s in service of things that we don’t really need. You know, we’re filling our lives with stuff instead of living full lives.”
ROMAN MARS: And he’s basically saying, “I’m going to come up with an energy policy here, it’s coming. But in the meantime, put on a sweater, keep your thermostat 65 during the daytime, 55 at night.” It’s really, like, a strange moment. And I don’t think people have ever witnessed a political leader acting like this. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: There were plenty of people who admired and liked what Carter was doing. But there were also lots of people who mocked it on the grounds that there was something un-American about doing with less, making yourself a little smaller. 
ROMAN MARS: This is Bill’s theory–one of them at least–that over the years America had become a place where people consumed with abandon, a place of great appetite and little restraint, and that this had become part of the American ideal, part of our way of life. And in such a place, people did not necessarily appreciate being told to make do with less. And so maybe Jimmy Carter’s energy policy had an image problem before it was even created. Anyway, eventually, two years after that fireside chat, in 1979, President Carter was back with the details. And he climbed up on the roof of the White House to put solar power at the heart of his plan. 
JIMMY CARTER: As president, I am determined that America will move toward the solar age with effectiveness and determination, with excitement, high spirits, and with confidence…
BILL MCKIBBEN: In his budget that he was preparing for the next year, America would have been producing 20% of its electricity from renewable energy by the year 2000. 
ROMAN MARS: This was Carter’s goal. 
JIMMY CARTER: If we use our technological imagination, if we can work together to harness the light of the sun, the power of the wind, the strength of rushing streams, then we will succeed…
ROMAN MARS: If we can work together. But right from the start, that was a big if. It required Americans to agree on what they wanted. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: This was a very, very live debate at that time in American history. One of Carter’s pollsters came to him in the late ’70s and said, “I’ve done a poll on what Americans think about economic growth and about a third don’t want any more economic growth for ecological reasons. About a third want full speed ahead. And about a third don’t know.” And his pollster said to him, “That’s an unstable arrangement. We’re going to flip one way or the other in the years ahead.”
ROMAN MARS: This is worth unpacking. Carter’s pollsters told him that America was divided in three groups: one, people who wanted to put the environment ahead of economic expansion, two, people who wanted economic expansion at all costs, and three, people who didn’t know what they wanted. It seems Carter’s pitch might not have worked for any of those groups. He did not argue for solar power on environmental grounds nor was he really arguing for economic expansion. And the third who didn’t know what they wanted? Maybe they needed someone to push them decisively one way or the other. And as it happens, there was somebody waiting in the wings, preparing to do exactly that. 
ROMAN MARS: You know, in 1979, the solar panels get installed. The next year is an election year. It’s Carter versus Reagan. 
JIMMY CARTER: For those who’ve abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again… 
ROMAN MARS: Now we know that that’s a landslide. At the time, it was a fight. 
JIMMY CARTER: Governor Reagan, again, typically is against such a proposal. 
MODERATOR: Governor? 
RONALD REAGAN: There you go again… 
ROMAN MARS: You know, Carter was in the lead for quite a long time. 
CNN: Ronald Wilson Reagan will become the 40th president of the United States. He’ll be sworn into office in ceremonies on the steps of the Capitol on January 20, 1981… 
BILL MCKIBBEN: I’d basically been on the road covering the presidential campaign for months. 
ROMAN MARS: Bill was a student, a teenager, writing for the Harvard Crimson. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: The Crimson was an odd operation for a college paper. It took itself very seriously. I’d interviewed Reagan. 
ROMAN MARS: Wow. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: And on election night, I was writing the 100-inch story, but I was very depressed by the results. People kept handing me bottles of beer. By the time I was done, truthfully, this was in some ways the first and, I think, really the last time in my life that I was epically, epically drunk. The story’s quite good. But by the time I was finished, I took myself home to my dorm and slept for the next 36 hours or so. And when I woke up, somewhat still hungover, I had the sense, though I was 19 at the time, that this was going to be the election that was going to matter enormously for the course of the world in my lifetime. 
RONALD REAGAN: It is no program simply to say “use less energy.” Of course, waste must be eliminated and efficiency promoted. But for the government simply to tell the people to conserve, that’s not an energy policy. At best, it means we’ll run out of energy a little more slowly. But a day will come when the lights will dim and the wheels of industry will turn more slowly and finally stop. As president, I will not endorse any course which has this as its principal objective…
BILL MCKIBBEN: Reagan’s policy was drill, drill, drill. And with the election of Ronald Reagan, we flipped decisively in the direction of more, drilling everywhere we could and trying to come up with as much oil as we could. And it was successful. Let’s be clear. It turned out America had lots of oil once you started just letting anyone drill anywhere they wanted. And the price came down. 
ROMAN MARS: It was a direct rebuttal to Carter’s approach. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: Carter was still very much in the wake of FDR and the New Deal and with the idea that we were going to work together to solve our problems. And what Reagan was about was the exact opposite idea, the exaltation of the individual. 
ROMAN MARS: And that any threat to the individual, any sacrifice to the individual, is antithetical to this new Americanism. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: To the idea of America. 
ROMAN MARS: You have this quote I really liked that this is a time period where we no longer viewed America as a group project. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: Yeah, I think that’s really at the heart of the difference between Carter and what came after. 
ROMAN MARS: And you have to remember, Bill says that Carter’s term was viewed by subsequent presidents as a kind of warning. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: It’s a little hard for us to remember that now because his post-presidency was so successful that, by the time he died, everyone was writing encomiums and hagiographies of the man. But really in American political culture for the decades that followed, he was the thing to avoid, someone who asked too much of Americans. Carter’s vision of the world was perceived as an incredible failure. And he was perceived as an incredible failure. 
ROMAN MARS: In 1984, Ronald Reagan was re-elected resoundingly. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: The most important thing he did was immediately scotch funding for new solar research. Indeed, the nascent solar industry in America went into a huge nosedive with thousands of people laid off.
ROMAN MARS: And then one day, Jimmy Carter’s 32 panels disappeared. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: It’s not like they had a press conference and made an announcement. They just were… One day they weren’t there anymore on the roof of the White House. 
ROMAN MARS: And when they came down, this was not noted by very many people, right? 
BILL MCKIBBEN: No. It was no longer even something we were really thinking about, I don’t think. The White House insiders who were quoted at the time were just like, “Solar power is a joke. Forget this.”
ROMAN MARS: And we did. Jimmy Carter’s promised great adventure was over before it got going, with his solar panels gathering dust someplace. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: They became relics. Reagan had literally turned them into the museum piece that Carter predicted, signposts to a path that we had decided not to take. 
[AD BREAK]
ROMAN MARS: Jimmy Carter’s solo panels were a symbol of a road not traveled. But the road we did take, that was something which young Bill McKibben found himself trying to understand on his own journey from journalist to campaigner.
BILL MCKIBBEN: I wasn’t yet an activist. I was very much a journalist. And I wrote a long piece for the New Yorker about where everything in my apartment at the corner of Bleecker and Broadway came from. And so I went to Brazil because Con Ed was getting oil from there and up into the Arctic because there was some hydro power coming down and on and on. And it left me with a new understanding of the world as a physical place. You know, I’d grown up in the suburbs, which are kind of a device for hiding the physical operation of the world. You know, where does water come from? Who knows? 
ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLING] The tap.
BILL MCKIBBEN: The tap, right. 
ROMAN MARS: In spending a year of finding out where everything in his apartment had come from, Bill was beginning to think a lot more deeply about humanity’s impact on the world. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: So I started reading the emerging early science in the mid 1980s around climate change with a lot more attention than I would have because I’d come to understand that the world was a more fragile place than I had guessed. 
ROMAN MARS: And Bill wasn’t the only one. Carter had sold solar as the answer to an energy crisis. The words “climate,” “green,” or “environment” didn’t feature in his White House rooftop speech once. But by now, the issue of climate change was starting to get a foothold in the public consciousness. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: Jim Hansen testified, in 1988, before Congress what was going to happen. 
ROMAN MARS: James Hansen was the director of a NASA Climate Research Institute. In 1988, he used a term in front of a Senate committee, which many people heard for the first time that day. 
JAMES HANSEN: The evidence that the Earth is warming by an amount which is too large to be a chance fluctuation represents a very strong case, in my opinion, that the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now…
ROMAN MARS: Hanson said he was 99% certain that climate change was real. The next year, at the age of 28, Bill published The End of Nature, the first book on climate change written for a general audience. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: And I kept writing about it for a decade or so because I’m a writer. And writers–journalists–are firm believers in the idea that winning the argument is the important thing and that if you win the argument, eventually the powers that be will do the right thing. 
It took me 10 or 15 years to recognize that we’d won the argument. The oil industry in the 1980s had been conducting their own in-depth research on climate change. I mean Exxon was the biggest company in the world then. It had a great staff of scientists, and their scientists were telling their executives exactly what Jim Hansen and NASA was telling Congress. In fact, their predictions for the temperature in 2020 were incredibly spot-on. And it’s also clear that the executives believed them. I mean, Exxon literally started building its drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level that they knew was in the offing. 
ROMAN MARS: Really, the science was settled an awfully long time ago. James Hansen’s Senate testimony was so long ago, 38 years, that a senator is smoking a cigarette on the floor of the chamber as he listens to the NASA scientist explain that mankind was changing the Earth’s climate. The oil companies themselves knew it, but they didn’t want the rest of us to cotton on. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: I always have wondered if, on the night that Jim Hansen had testified to Congress, the CEO of Exxon had gone on the news and just said, “You know what? Our scientists are telling us the same thing.” No one would have said, “Well, Exxon’s being alarmist about this.” Everyone would just have said, “We’ve got to get down to work.” Instead, the entire industry joined together in building this architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that kept us locked in an utterly sterile debate about whether or not global warming was real, a debate, remember, that both sides know the answer to at the beginning. 
ROMAN MARS: Bill realized that the reason he and his fellow journalists were losing the fight wasn’t because they didn’t have the evidence to win. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: We were just losing the fight because the fight was what fights are normally about, which was money and power, and the fossil fuel industry had so much money and power that they were able to lose the scientific argument but just keep their business model rolling along. 
ROMAN MARS: So while it may be true that Carter dented the image of solar by attaching himself and his unpopularity to it, it’s also true that a big hit to renewable energy came from the fossil fuel industry trying to protect the status quo. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: So that was the point at which I started to become an activist. 
ROMAN MARS: And Bill the activist started to take action. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: So, we’d started this thing called 350.org in 2009 or so–me and seven college students at Middlebury College, where I still teach. And our plan was to organize the world to fight climate change. So our first big day of action was in 2009. We organized 5,100 simultaneous protests in 181 countries. It was the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history. And it was quite remarkable to look at, but we weren’t completely clear sort of how to follow it up. 
ROMAN MARS: But then Bill had an idea. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: Get people around the world, especially world leaders, to put solar panels on the roof of their palaces. 
ROMAN MARS: And it was a small leap from that thought to a bigger one. What about those panels Jimmy Carter put up and Ronald Reagan pulled down? What about those solar panels? Imagine the symbolism if our new president, Barack Obama, put them right back up on the White House roof again. This wasn’t quite as crazy as it sounds because Bill had a pretty good idea where the panels were. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: They ended up in a government warehouse where a young environmental studies professor, from a little college in Maine called Unity College, tracked them down and said, “Can I have these?” And I guess they just said, “Sure, take them. We’ve got no use for them.” So they took them and installed them on the roof of the dining hall. And there they worked for many many years, providing the hot water that showered the young people who came to this college to study the environment. 
ROMAN MARS: By 2010, many of the panels had been retired by Unity College. They donated one to the Jimmy Carter Library and another to the Smithsonian. But Bill had come across a third somewhere much further afield. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: I saw one in the personal museum of the Chinese mogul who had become the biggest solar hot water entrepreneur in the world and who had a vast complex, a couple of hours from Beijing, called the Sun-Moon Mansion. And he had one of Carter’s solar panels. And he paid it great homage as, you know, the equivalent of having the moon lander from the Apollo mission or something. 
ROMAN MARS: Many of the rest just sat in storage at Unity College, once again, gathering dust. And Bill wondered if he could get his hands on one. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: So, I called up the president of the college, a guy named Mitch Thomashow. And he said, “Yeah! Take a few! And while you’re doing it, take a few of our students with you.” And so we started driving to Washington. 
ROMAN MARS: Just Bill, a bunch of students, and some 1970s solar panels in a crazy plan to persuade the Obama administration to reinstall them. 
DEMOCRACY NOW!: On Tuesday, a group of students took one of the panels, packed it onto a biodiesel van, and set out on a trip to Washington… 
SOLAR RALLY: We gotta put solar on the White House! We gotta put solar on the White House…
BILL MCKIBBEN: We were quite energized with the idea that we were returning these to the young Obama administration and that they would put them back on the roof. And so we’d stop each night, first in Boston, then in New York, and then in Baltimore or Washington, and have a rally. And part of the rally was we would pour some water in the solar panel pointed at the sun and wait 15 minutes until you could see the steam. There was hot water, you know, pouring out. 
ROMAN MARS: The panels still worked as well as they did the day they went up in 1979. And now, they were coming home. 
ROMAN MARS: So what was your plan when you got to Washington with these things? 
BILL MCKIBBEN: The plan was to hand them over. So we showed up in Washington. And they ushered us into this ornate room in the Executive Office Building where these two Obama administration officials just engaged in the most crazy filibuster for, like, 90 minutes. They just sort of talked about a list of all the environmentally sound things that the Obama administration was doing. Then these three young women who had come along with the solar panels from Maine–they were politely but forthrightly interrupting occasionally to say, “Yes, that’s great, but wouldn’t this be a terrific symbol to have back? And why wouldn’t you?” And these people would not answer that question. 
ROMAN MARS: At this point in the story, I have to admit I have some sympathy for the Obama officials. If Bill turned up– I love Bill. I love everything Bill does. I think he’s a national hero. If Bill turned up at my house with a decades-old solar panel demanding that I put them on my roof, I might have dispensed with a polite filibuster and just said, “No, thanks,” which is what, at the end of the day, they said. And to Bill, the reason was clear enough. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: They didn’t want them because they were associated with Jimmy Carter. And in 2010, Jimmy Carter was still regarded by people like Barack Obama as a signal of failure, as someone who hadn’t been a good politician, hadn’t read the public mood, hadn’t managed to get reelected, you know? And so they viewed this as an association with failure, and they didn’t want it. 
ROMAN MARS: What specifically do you think Obama was nervous about being associated with? Was it just environmentalism? Was it just the Carter-ness of it all?
BILL MCKIBBEN: I think it was the Carter-ness of it all. And they were not that interested in renewable energy as a policy. “Renewable energy worked 30 years ago on the building that you’re sitting in. The solar panel still works. Here it is. Why don’t you put it back up? That’d be great.” And they didn’t really want to hear that. 
ROMAN MARS: Bill’s road trip was a failure, kind of. 
ROMAN MARS: When did the Obama administration begin to develop its opinion about solar? 
BILL MCKIBBEN: Second-term Obama, they get a little more interested in this stuff and they give some federal incentives for solar development. 
BARACK OBAMA: The promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith, not anymore… 
BILL MCKIBBEN: People will remember the tax credit that famously went to Solyndra, which then went bankrupt. But they did other things like that. It wasn’t on that huge a scale. 
ROMAN MARS: But they did put solar panels on the roof eventually.
BILL MCKIBBEN: And they did put solar panels in the second term up on the roof of the White House. So, you know, what was that? 30 years or more later, we returned solar panels to the roof of the White House, where I think they still remain even now. 
ROMAN MARS: Just to be clear, these were not Jimmy Carter’s old panels. These were new ones. But still, the symbolism is there. A president embracing solar, starting with their own rooftop. So, what had changed? 
BILL MCKIBBEN: You know, we’ve now entered a different world. Finally, 25 years after Jimmy Carter wanted it to happen, we’re reaching the point where solar power is becoming the clear, obvious, common sense, straightforward way to power the world. 
ROMAN MARS: Solar power is now the emergent force in energy generation across the world. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: It can’t stop climate change at this point. We’ve waited too long. But it can shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually gets. And every tenth of a decree that we raise the temperature moves a hundred million human beings out of a relatively safe climate zone into a relatively dangerous one. Around the planet, 95% of new electric generation last year came from sun and wind. It’s now accelerating even faster in the wake of our misadventure in Iran because, around the world, leaders are quickly realizing that though sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the Earth. None of those miles go through the straight of Hormuz. And it’s the fastest energy transition of this kind we’ve ever seen. So it’s increasingly a no-brainer in every way. 
ROMAN MARS: Bill may say it’s a no-brainer, but in the United States, we still seem to yo-yo, falling in and out of love with the idea of harnessing the sun, as one administration replaces another. Obama’s administration really leaned into solar power in its second term and introduced legislation designed to encourage it. But then…
DONALD TRUMP: We will drill, baby, drill…
ROMAN MARS: Donald Trump’s administration cut back on clean power initiatives in favor of encouraging fossil fuels. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: Now, the United States is the one country on planet Earth that’s desperately trying to discourage solar power. Our federal government has removed all the incentives for it. It has essentially banned it from any federal lands anywhere. The country that invented this stuff and the country where, under Jimmy Carter, it had its first real surge is now the only country on Earth that’s doing everything it can to shut them down. 
ROMAN MARS: And what’s even more amazing about this is, like, you talked about the time of uphill battle where the economics it was fighting against, but now the economics is not fighting against it anymore.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Solar power is the cheapest form of energy on Earth. It’s almost unbelievable how quickly the price of this has come down. Every time we double the number of solar panels on the Earth, which at the moment is every couple of years, the price falls another 25% just because coal and gas and oil are something that you have to go find. And hence it gets harder to find them. At the moment, if you want to get oil, you have to get good at going miles under the surface of the ocean because all the Beverly Hillbillies stuff is long since used up. But the sun shines thousands of times more energy at us than we could ever hope to use. 
ROMAN MARS: While America hasn’t embraced solar, others definitely have. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: You go look at a country like Pakistan, which has suffered terribly from climate change. But the thing that’s driving them at this point to put up solar panels is that their electricity supply is unreliable and expensive. So because they have a border with China, millions upon millions of individual Pakistanis have just gone and bought solar panels and then gone on YouTube and figured out how to hook them together. And they’ve built the equivalent of something like half the country’s national electric grid in the course of eight months. It’s hard for Americans to understand this because we’re the one place that isn’t doing it. 
JIMMY CARTER: In the year 2000, the solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here, supplying cheap, efficient energy… 
ROMAN MARS: On the White House roof in 1979, Carter had outlined the possible futures for his 32 solar panels. 
JIMMY CARTER: A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity… 
ROMAN MARS: The kind kept by a Chinese collector. 
JIMMY CARTER: A museum piece… 
ROMAN MARS: Something the Smithsonian puts behind glass. 
JIMMY CARTER: An example of a road not taken… 
ROMAN MARS: The United States is still nowhere near the target Jimmy Carter set, to produce 20% of its power from renewable energy by 2000. In 2025, renewable energy represented less than 10% of America’s total energy generation. 
JIMMY CARTER: Or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest adventures ever undertaken by the American people…
BILL MCKIBBEN: Political discourse tends to be about ideas and numbers and ideologies and so on. It’s only occasionally that tangible objects–material things–assume that kind of importance.
ROMAN MARS: Jimmy Carter’s solar panels are important because they remind us that his great adventure did not happen. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: America could still embark on an exciting adventure around all this. We remain a huge and important country. And with the right nurturing from the government, it could be a huge part of the future. 
But we’re not going to lead it at this point. It’s not that we’re entirely shut out of this adventure, but we do not any longer get to be its protagonists. 
ROMAN MARS: Bill McKibben, thank you so much for talking with me and telling me the story of the solar panels. I had a fun time. 
BILL MCKIBBEN: I had a really fun time thinking back on those days. 
ROMAN MARS: Bill McKibben is a journalist, environmental activist, and founder of 350.org. If you enjoyed this discussion and want to know more about the history of solar energy, you should check out Bill’s excellent book, Here Comes the Sun, which is an exploration of how solar energy can still change the road we’ve taken. 
A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It’s hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Isaac Fisher. Our other producers are Priscilla Alabi, Brenna Daldorph, and Ellie Lightfoot. 
This episode was edited by Richard Knight. The series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Charlie Brandon-King. Fact-checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. 
From 99% Invisible, our Executive producer is Kathy Tu. From BBC Studios, our Executive Producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our Production coordinator is Shan Pill-ay and production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence. 
99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful… White City… West London.
Hey, you wanna know something fun? This episode actually started as a listener suggestion. If you have a suggestion for an object you want us to consider, email us at [email protected].
This episode is hosted and curated by Roman Mars, and produced by Isaac Fisher. Series producers are Priscilla Alabi, Brenna Daldorph, and Ellie Lightfoot. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Charlie Brandon-King. Fact-checking by Amy Bracken. Theme song by Swan Real. Executive producers are Annie Brown, Courtney Harrell, and Kathy Tu. Production coordinator is Shan Palay. Production manager is Mabel Finnegan Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence.
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