A Symbolic Solar Road Trip To Reignite a Climate Movement

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.

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.

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.

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.