On June 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter—sporting a bushy haircut and a wide necktie—invited dignitaries and reporters onto the roof of the White House to watch the installation of thirty-two solar water-heating panels. “A generation from now,” he told them, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”A generation later, one of those panels showed up in a private museum in the offices of an entrepreneur named Huang Ming, in the city of Dezhou, China. In the spring of 2010, I interviewed Ming, who was building a vast fortune by installing pretty much the same solar water heaters across the country. If you’re flying into a Chinese city, look down and you might see one of the devices on every other roof; even back then there were places where ninety-five per cent of homes sported a panel. Ming had built a truly remarkable headquarters—the so-called Sun-Moon Mansion looked like something out of “The Jetsons,” with two sweeping horseshoes of solar panels that resembled the rings of Saturn cut in half. Ming described Carter as a visionary, and shook his head a little ruefully at the path America hadn’t followed.That path—well, it’s truly painful to look back on it now, from the vantage point of an Earth where the poles are melting fast, where Africa may be losing fifteen per cent a year of its G.D.P. per capita because of the effects of warming, and where a senior climate adviser for the current President recently said that we now need “a transformation of the global economy on a size and scale that’s never occurred in human history” to “create a livable future for ourselves and our children.” Jimmy Carter, who was elected in 1976, wasn’t focussed on global warming, though advisers were beginning to warn him about it. Even without the existential impetus of climate change, though, struggling to stay politically afloat during the geopolitical crises that came with the twin oil shocks of the seventies—one caused by OPEC’s embargo, the other largely by the Iranian Revolution—he sensed how high the stakes really were. The energy crisis, he told Americans early on, using adult language that it’s impossible to imagine an American President using today, was a reminder that “ours is the most wasteful nation on earth.”By 1979, gas-station lines were causing alarm in suburbia, and knocking the edge off his popularity. But, instead of simply drilling more oil wells (America was just a decade removed from the Santa Barbara oil spill and the first Earth Day), he treated the trouble as an opportunity. “All the legislation in the world can’t fix what is wrong with America,” he said. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” It was time to act on the realization that “owning things and consuming things does n
Gio. Gen 9th, 2025
