It's simply too bad that we didn't follow through on the recommendation of that White House Council. Instead we choose to build more weapons of war rather than address the root cause of what would lead us to the wars in which we found ourselves engaged.

Ronnie set us back 30 years.


^snip from previous link^



For Denis Hayes the transition of administrations was a time of great uncertainty. The biggest question was whom the president would choose as the Secretary of Energy. As a possible sign of Reagan's interest, or lack thereof, in the field of energy, this would be the last cabinet position he'd get around to selecting. As Hayes recalls, "he chose, apparently by throwing a dart at the wall, a guy named Jim Edwards, the former governor of South Carolina, a dentist by profession, to be Secretary of Energy." Edwards would replace Charles Duncan Jr., a former president of Coca-Cola.

Inside the halls of the Solar Institute in Golden, Colorado, the irony of a dentist replacing a soft drink executive was not lost on the aforementioned group of Noble-caliber scientists. Says Hayes; "It suggests something about the feeling of whether or not somebody needs to know anything about a fairly complicated field before you give them the [department's] highest office in the land." A former dentist was now calling the shots on whether the experiments and research undertaken by SERI's staff of distinguished scientists would ever see the light of day.

By June 1981, Dennis Hayes was out of a job; along with 370 of the gifted scientists and activists he had recruited. Reagan's distaste for all things solar was never more evident than by his dismantling of the solar panels Carter had placed atop the White House roof, but that display was only the beginning as the budget for solar development, along with subsidies and tax credits for the industry were slashed. With federal backing virtually wiped out overnight, young solar companies began to collapse and the industry as a whole was on the ropes.

Reducing the nation's reliance on foreign oil and fossil fuels, in general, would have seemed to have been in the U.S.'s interests. In order for this to happen, scientists and renewable advocates pushed for the same federal backing that all other energy sources received in their years of infancy, going all the way back to timber. Instead, the Reagan administration chose to double-down on fossil fuels and keep heaping enormous amounts of taxpayers' money in this direction. As an alternative to foreign oil, the new administration put its support behind, not renewables, but synthetic fuels.

the Reagan years.

Heh not dropped for the same reasons as our having no universal healthcare and why some Americans eat pinkslime for food.

I wish you people would understand how solar produces electricity and oil greases the wheels that run our society.

Heh heh lol. Fossil fuels and electricity go hand in hand. Not sure your point. And yeah oil does grease the wheels of society.

Fossil fuels and electricity are not one in the same energy sources. My point is simple too, you can have all the solar you want and it will replace very in the way of oil consumption.

under the guise of opec.

...and we are paying the price for it now.