As the world grapples with the existential crisis of climate change, environmental activists want President Joe Biden to phase out the oil industry, and Republicans argue he’s already doing that. Meanwhile, the surprising reality is the United States is pumping oil at a blistering pace and is on track to produce more oil than any country has in history.
They could have said it with renewable energy, but they said it with oil.
The day Reagan took Carter’s solar panels off the White House was the day our planet was doomed.
it was solar water heating, but yeah, total dick move. I will say, renewable tech has finally caught up to the demand and we’re all benefitting for it today; the best solar panel you could acquire in 1979 would yield less than 1/4 today’s panels and be much heavier and more expensive - we weren’t in a position for Solar to take any percentage of the requirement. Same with wind power - turbines are 10x larger now, and their massive props took decades to develop to yield today’s massive farms that are capable of powering hundreds of thousands of residences. Geothermal, hydro and other means might have been deployed more, hard to say.
Our planet’s not doomed, it’ll be fine when we’ve destroyed our only biosphere and poisoned / wrecked all the food sources. The planet will keep on trucking just fine. Humanity may be ultimately self defeating, but we’re not dead quite yet. We might just still pull this out. I’m trying, real hard, to stay just slightly optimistic.
The sun transmits a lot more heat energy than light energy, so using it to heat water is actually really smart. Especially if you can run that hot water through your HVAC system and heat a living space.
Solar thermal systems are so simple to build you can do it with a bit of wood, some aluminum cans, a piece of glass, and some black paint. And you get a lot of heat out of something like that with no moving parts.
yup. and critically, it was all available in 79, when this was rolled out. I would love to see a 100% renewable federal energy budget but we literally can’t do it today with our modern tech, 1979 it was a dream. but Carter realized that examples like the white house saving tens of thousands of dollars every month on something as simple as hot water was a win, no matter if the tech was a panacea for our energy needs - the action of doing something.
reagan and conservatives are in the pocket of big industry and big oil, so yeah, no shit they didn’t go for it, chuds.
My dad really loved Carter, and designed and built a passive solar home that he hoped would be the blueprint for whole developments of them.
Then Reagan got elected.
Luckily he’s still got the plans somewhere.
I think Carter was one of the best presidents we’ve ever had in a lot of ways.
Former military, submariner, without an ounce of warmonger in the dude. avoided conflict intelligently. did the best with a shit-sandwich of multiple world crisis landing. genuinely believed in his religion without ever forcing it on others. lived humbly. knew we were building the f117 and it’s existence basically negated a lot of the need for the b-1 (lol bone) (which had a host of other threats and problems dogging it) - and Reagan crucified him for the choice by pandering to the military industrial complex even after he was read-into the situation. Was scientifically literate enough to understand stealth changed the entire landscape of war.
There’s a lot to love, the right just hates him because of bullshit.
The investments could have been made to get us to where we are now a lot sooner. We chose not to make that investment.
pray tell, what 1980s tech could have swept in, I’m genuinely curious what you know.
Technology doesn’t have an era attached to it. It is whatever is created in its time. More investment means faster advancement of technology. The capabilities of the solar of today don’t have anything inherently “modern” about it. It’s just that it exists today, but could have existed decades ago or decades from now, depending on how quickly technology progressed, which is mostly a factor of how much time/money/effort are invested into it.
see the illusion there is if we had just invested enough directly into solar that we could have gotten to today’s tech faster. but today’s tech is a mishmash of pv, materials development, photolithography and a ton of other processes that took the intervening 40 years to achieve. Some of it could have been accelerated but I honestly can’t see how that would have changed the state we’re in.
Now, changing the narrative in 1979 - that’s a what-if book I’d fucking read. Carter hits Reagan for colluding with Iran and america wakes up to the scientists first warnings - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ - https://e360.yale.edu/features/they-knew-how-the-u-s-government-helped-cause-the-climate-crisis - instead of helping big petroleum by subsidizing it to the tune of billions of dollars every year continuing today - we could have taken a turn towards the inevitable change, well we might have saved the ecosystem.
Today it’d take ww2 levels of focus around the world to avert the worst. But changing the narrative back then, oof. That would have been powerful.