A quarter-century after President Ronald Reagan dismantled the solar panels placed on the White House roof by his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, the Obama administration has announced that it will install solar energy panels and a solar water heater atop the White House. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu made the announcement, saying in a statement, “As we move toward a clean-energy economy, the White House will lead by example… This project reflects President Obama’s strong commitment to U.S. leadership in solar energy and the jobs it will create at home.”

His announcement comes a month after activist Bill McKibben led a caravan from Maine to Washington carrying one of the Carter-era solar panels and urging Obama to reinstall it. “The White House did the right thing, and for the right reasons,” McKibben said in a statement. “They listened to the scientists and engineers who told them this is the path to the future.” The new panels, which will be installed this spring, will heat water and provide a small amount of electricity to the White House residence.

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An activist caravan to bring one of Jimmy Carter’s solar panels back to the White House symbolizes not only the time the U.S. has lost in developing new energy technologies – but also the urgent need for taking action on climate.

As I write this piece, we’re in the midst of a (biodiesel) road trip to Washington, D.C., towing behind us an unwieldy piece of history: a solar panel off the roof of the Carter White House. It’s decades old, though it still makes hot water just fine. In a sense, we’re traveling backward—which in another sense is what I think we’re going to have to do for a while in the U.S. climate movement.

The bad news everyone knows. The strongest attempt ever to pass climate legislation through the U.S. Congress came up short earlier this summer. The inside-the-Beltway green groups took what seemed to be the route of least resistance: a very tame piece of climate legislation larded with special prizes for special interests. They worked it as hard as it could have been worked—and in the end it didn’t even come close. The fossil fuel industry and their allies in D.C. barely had to break a sweat shooting it down.

So—barring some unforeseen development—we’re not going to see significant action on the federal level about climate for at least the next two years.

The solar panels need to be up on the roof, as visible as the White House garden.

And that means we’re far less likely to see significant international action on climate, since it’s hard for other governments to muster the political will to make tough choices when the U.S. is punting.

So what do we do with those two years? I think we use them to build a movement, which explains the solar panel we’re hauling south from Maine.

The story is painful even to consider. This panel went up on the White House roof in 1979, with then-president Jimmy Carter (in a wide tie, and with a bushy haircut) promising that it would still be there in the year 2000, producing hot water from the sun for whoever was then president. In fact, it didn’t make it through the next decade—it came down in the Reagan years, a symbol of our decision to turn away from the idea of limits and veer sharply down the path we’ve trod ever since.

But not everyone went along. Frugal folks at Unity College in Maine salvaged the panels, and put them up on the cafeteria, where they continued to produce hot water for the next three decades. Meanwhile, around the world other nations took the technology and went to work. Germany and Japan took over the lead in photovoltaic panels, but solar thermal technology like this became the special province of the Chinese.

I sat not long ago with Huang Ming, China’s leading solar entrepreneur, in his space-age Sun Moon Mansion in Shandong Province looking over the stats: his HiMin Solar Energy Group has put up 60 million such systems across China—he estimated that when 250 million Chinese take a shower, the hot water is coming off their roofs. In a biting symbol of that passed torch, he keeps one of the Carter panels in his private museum.

There’s no question what we should have spent the last few decades doing. But there’s no point now in crying about why we didn’t: the only job is to try to get back in the game, to start catching up.

Some of that means spending the money so that we can make the next technological discoveries. Many, including the Breakthrough Institute and Bill Gates, are calling for big increases in R and D funding, which might help us somehow claw our way back toward the front of the parade.

President Obama is up against tough odds in Congress. But they can’t filibuster his roof.

But catching up also means making use of the technology we already have, in ways both practical and symbolic. We’re headed for the White House with this old panel, and with a promise from the U.S. company Sungevity that it will supply all the brand-new panels the president could ever want—as long as he puts them up on his roof where everyone can see them. George W. Bush, amazingly enough, actually put some solar back in the White House grounds—on the roof of a maintenance shed, and on, who knew, the Presidental Spa and Cabana. But since he didn’t tell anyone, they didn’t do much good. We want them up there on the roof, as visible as the White House garden, which helped boost seed sales 30 percent across the nation the year Michelle planted it.

So far, we haven’t heard a word from the White House about whether they’ll accept the gift and make the promise or not—which, frankly, surprises me. I can’t think of a clearer win for the president, a better reminder to the legions of young people who worked on his campaign that he is still focused on the future. He owes environmentalists more than he’s given them—by all accounts he decided not to push for the Senate legislation. He’s up against tough odds in Congress, of course, given the obstructionist GOP. But they can’t filibuster his roof.

The point of the solar panels is to help build the movement that we allowed to wither away.

What’s especially poignant is that we have gotten promises from other, much less likely, world leaders—Mohammed Nasheed, for instance, president of the entirely Muslim and quite poor Maldive Islands, the low-lying Indian Ocean nation that faces inundation from rising seas. He took the Sungevity offer, and he’ll be putting solar panels on his roof on October 10 (10-10-10), the same day that thousands of groups around the world will be participating in a massive Global Work Party, putting up wind turbines and laying out bike paths. The same day we want Barack Obama, sleeves rolled up, out on his roof with a wrench.

The point of all these panels, of course, is not that we’re going to solve climate change one roof at a time. (Obama is doing lots of good practical things already—his “greening the government” effort is retrofitting federal buildings across the country with insulation, for instance). The point is that they help build the movement that we allowed to wither away.

Environmentalists lost sight of just how big a movement that would need to be. Too many groups convinced themselves that they could slide some legislation through Congress, make deals with industry, get things going without a fight. It was worth a try, but it didn’t work—the fossil fuel industry, the most profitable enterprise known to man, beat us. And they will beat us again and again until there’s a real, broad-based, popular, noisy movement underway in this country, a movement that can provide a currency (bodies, passion) equal to the currency the billionaire Koch Brothers can pony up to defeat climate legislation.

Some of that movement will go on at the local level, as we transform cities and towns and show what can be done. Some will be done on college campuses like Unity College, or Middlebury where I teach, which are showing the way forward. Some of it will be done in jails—I’d be very surprised if civil disobedience doesn’t become a bigger part of this battle in the years ahead, if only because it’s the tool we use to show our society how urgent, morally and practically, this crisis really is.

But some of it must be done symbolically. And there’s no more symbolic piece of real estate on this continent than the White House. Let’s hope that on the 10th of October it, at least, is transformed. It’s been a long, hot summer, in the capitol as in much of the northern hemisphere. Let’s make sure that next year that heat is put to some purpose—heating the Obamas’ bathtub, and helping power up a movement.

Article by Bill McKibben.

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On Friday Morning from 10:30 AM EDT to 1 PM EDT, the White House will host a Clean Energy Economy Forum focused on clean energy manufacturing. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke will kick off the event with opening remarks followed by two panel discussions focusing on strategies to advance the development and commercialization of new clean energy technologies, support the creation and growth of emerging industries and small and medium enterprises, promote exports, and train workers for the clean energy economy.

You can watch the forum live tomorrow at WhiteHouse.gov/live. During the question and answer portion of the panel discussions we’ll be taking some questions from the online audience so submit your questions via Facebook or our webform.

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Today President Obama travelled to Iowa and visited Siemens Energy, Inc., where he received a tour of the facility and saw the creation of blades that are capable of generating enough power for hundreds of homes. The President said that each employee of Siemens “Is helping stake America’s claim on a clean-energy future.”

The President discussed the future of clean energy in America, calling energy security “a top priority for my administration since the day I took office.” He explained that the Recovery Act made the largest investment in clean energy in the nation’s history- an investment expected to create or save 700,000 jobs by the end of 2012 and double America’s capacity to generate renewable electricity from sources like the sun and the wind:

So in the midst of the economic turmoil, the Recovery Act helped make it possible for America to install nearly 10 gigawatts of new wind-generating capacity last year alone -– and that’s enough to power more than 2.4 million American homes.  So when people ask you what was the Recovery Act about, what was the stimulus about, it was about this — this plant.

The President praised Iowa for already generating a higher percentage of electricity from wind than any other state because of facilities like Siemens Energy:

And as extraordinary as this facility is, here’s the thing  — wind power isn’t a silver bullet, it’s not going to solve all our energy challenges.  There’s no single energy source.  The key is to understand that this is a key component, a key part of a comprehensive strategy to move us from an economy that just runs on fossil fuels to one that relies on more homegrown fuels and clean energy.  I believe that we can come together around this issue and pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation that will ignite new industries, spark new jobs in towns just like Fort Madison, make America more energy-independent.  Our security, our economy, the future of our planet all depend on it.

Article by Jesse Lee appearing courtesy the White House Blog.

photo: Lawrence Jackson/White House

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday proposed a $5 billion expansion of a clean energy tax credit as the White House unveiled the latest part of its push to tackle double-digit U.S. unemployment.

Senior Obama administration officials said they were confident of getting quick congressional support for the plan, which they expect to generate $15 billion or more in private investment and create tens of thousands of new manufacturing jobs.

The announcement came alongside a White House report on the vital role manufacturing plays in the U.S. economy, as Biden hosted chief executives to unveil a new framework from President Barack Obama to boost U.S. factories.

The officials said in a telephone conference that ensuring foreign exchange values were set in markets was part of the wider discussion on helping U.S. manufacturers lift exports, but were not a specific item in Obama’s current focus. U.S. manufactures complain China artificially holds the value of its yuan currency down to give its exports a competitive edge.

Reporting by Alister Bull; editing by Andrea Ricci; article appearing courtesy of Reuters

[photo credit: The White House]

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“No Drama” Obama somehow managed to step in it again last week, plunging himself into the Skip Gates arrest and racial politics when he was meant to be drumming up support for health care reform.

If the measure of how badly the White House narrative veered off course is to observe that many of the Sunday shows spent more time on ObamaGates (I might have to trademark that one) than they did on health care, it is worth noting that Waxman-Markey is barely in the rear view mirror anymore. It does not appear to be on the Senate’s radar either.

Any hope of climate change legislation is rapidly fading and Waxman-Markey is poised to become another smudge on the road, steam rolled by the political process in much the same way the BTU Tax, Kyoto ratification, and previous energy-environment bills were.

What went wrong? I’m interested in your thoughts on whether cap-and-trade ever had a chance? Or, is strategy to blame for squandering the best chance at climate change legislation that we have had in a generation? If so, who dropped the ball? The White House? The House Dems? Senate leadership?

I’ll post my “three strikes” below, but what do you think killed cap-and-trade?

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It is worth taking a minute to run over to National Journal Online’s Energy-Environment blog to read their ongoing discussion, entitled “Running in Place.” The series reflects on progress made in energy-environment policy in the last thirty years, since President Carter committed that we would never again import as much oil as we did in 1979.

Obviously, Carter could not bring that to reality, and we now import three times as much oil as we did when those words were uttered (from a little over a million barrels a year then to 3.5 M bpy today). “Running in Place” brings together leaders from the energy industry, policymakers and environmental advocates to analyze what has gone right, what has gone wrong, and what needs to happen going forward.

Alas, I was not one of the “invited” participants for the forum. Had I been, I would have answered the NJO’s question: “Has anything changed?” as follows.

President Obama’s push for action on climate change is really only the first bite at the apple. The actions that Carter took (i.e., PURPA amendments) and that subsequent administrations carried forward (i.e., deregulation/PUHCA repeal) were not directed at the energy-environment nexus as we recognize it today.

Those policies viewed energy and the environment as discrete commodities. They were economic policies, aimed at bringing us more affordable energy. They were national security policies, aimed at weaning us from dependence on foreign sources of fuel – especially unreliable or unfriendly sources.

But, Barack Obama has climate change. Things have changed. National security and domestic control and cost may all have been a part of the conversation during the Waxman-Markey debate, but the ballast in that bill is the critical energy-environment linkage.

The bill itself may not have been ideal, and nothing better is likely to pass the Senate, but just this shift in perspective is significant. It is something to build upon. It remains to be seen if Obama can do what Carter promised.

[photo credit: BL1961]

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Amongst the hoo-ha of the US presidential inauguration I noted a small article stating that the new President is getting some pressure to turn the White House lawn into a vegetable patch all be it a somewhat large one, under the spiffy banner of eat the view. Putting aside for the moment critical considerations this would create, such as defining if broccoli was patriotic enough to be planted, and if a composter would be seen as a threat to the nation. There may be mileage in taking this idea a step further to demonstrate his by now well documented and stated clean tech commitments.

So amongst the bean poles and rows of cabbages can we expect to see a thundering bio-mass unit converting the degradable waste and compost, PV panels on the greenhouse, and a small wind turbine chugging away behind the West Wing all working to create renewable energy? Will the presidential helicopter, Marine 1, and Air Force 1 now run on bio-diesel and is there an electric cell capable of hauling 2.5 tons of armoured “beast”, every time the president heads out the door for a spot of business?

Personally I think this well meaning statement could well begin a drive by the green fingered and minded amongst us globally to get their own leaders to follow suit and cultivate their manifesto to a full green policy. I can already imagine Parliament Square opposite the Houses of Parliament in the UK becoming a series of allotments allowing ministers from all parts of the house to grow their own. Shed space may be optimal but in the spirit of green I am sure that a cross party pact for wheel barrows, dibblers, lobbers and spades could be reached.

Aside from the humour – for which as a person of little or no horticultural skills, I make no apology – there is a valid point to be made that IF you are going to be seen as green  (and I for one have every belief that this president has very little choice but to deliver on his promises for a green revolution), then it makes total sense to start on your “home turf”. Digging up the lawn is one thing, promoting and supporting new and better technology that can create jobs, reduce emissions, and maybe give the human race a few more millennia is quite another.

So I would ask Barack to by all means bring in a team of ruddy faced gardeners to make the view more productive and edible, but also regularly invite smart and able clean tech businesses to show how much of an impact they can make. It does not have to be over complex nor involving major redesign of the Pentagon or the Oval Office – just things that like growing food locally makes total and utter sense, and prove to the doubters that when you say something you have the gumption to stick to and deliver it.

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