Opinion | The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate

Activism, engineering and — I know you’re sort of including this in there — state policy.

A number of governments around the world — Germany was a key mover here, America has been on and off a key mover here, and China pumped money into creating a market for something that was not yet economically feasible just on its own cost — pulled forward all this technology, so now it is increasingly economically feasible on its own.

I do think there’s an interesting, underlying thing worth thinking about there, which is that we often treat technology and policy as separate spheres from each other, but they’re not. Policy can create technology.

Let’s go back to the great missed opportunity, which was the 1970s. Jimmy Carter was facing an oil crisis, and with the first intimations of some of the climate effects of fossil fuel, decides that solar is the way out. He famously puts solar panels on the White House. But he goes to give a speech where he says — prophetically, sadly, as it turns out:

Archival clip of Jimmy Carter: A generation from now 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.

He actually says that?

He put money that was sufficient, people thought, to power the research and development such that America would have 20 percent of its energy coming from solar power by the year 2000. Had that happened, we would live on a different planet, a cooler one.

Instead, of course, Ronald Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House. More important, he ripped that money out of the federal budget and committed us to the project of ever more drilling — which is what has landed us where we are now.

Let’s talk through some of the objections or concerns people have here. Australia — a lot of sun, very warm.