Guest blogger Denis Hayes was national coordinator for the first Earth Day in 1970, and director of the federal Solar Energy Research Institute from 1979 to 1981. He is now president of the Bullitt Foundation and international chair of Earth Day 2010. Find out about the Earth Day big rally in Washington, D.C., as well as other actions you can take, at the Earth Day Network website.

Earth Day Network is organizing a huge event on the Mall in Washington D.C. on April 25. The goal is to demand tough, effective climate legislation and a swift transition away from 19th century energy sources.

“So what?” you may be asking yourself. There have been a lot of climate rallies over the last 25 years and Congress still hasn’t managed to pass a law. Why should I come to this one?

Let me count the ways …

Size

Past climate rallies have generally run from a few dozen people to a couple thousand. On Sunday, April 25, energy and climate activists from New England to the Carolinas will gather together to find new friends and allies at largest climate rally ever. We are coming together to move beyond education; to demand change; and to make it clear there will be political consequences of Congress doesn’t act.

Inspiration and direction

You will hear from:
Climate scientists like James Hansen, and Stephen Schneider.
EPA chief (and heroine!) Lisa Jackson and CEQ Chair Nancy Sutley
Cultural leaders like James Cameron (Avatar; Titanic) and Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale; The Blind Assassin)
Top business executives from Siemens, Phillips, UL, Future Friendly, and SunEdison
Top labor leaders, including the President of the AFL-CIO and Secretary of the SEIU.
Progressive activists, including Jesse Jackson, Lydia Camarillo, and Hilary Shelton
Climate policy gurus like Joe Romm, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, and Rafael Fantauzzi
Spiritual leaders, including Rev. Theresa Thames, Rev. Richard Cizik, and Rabbi Warren Stone
Athletes like Dhani Jones, Aaron Peirsol, and Billy Demong
Environmentalists like Bobby Kennedy and Phillipe Cousteau

Entertainment

In between the speakers we will hear from some of the most committed artists in the nation, including Sting, John Legend, The Roots, Willie Colon, Passion Pit, Bob Weir, Jimmy Cliff, Joss Stone, Booker T, The Honor Society, Mavis Staples …

Intensity

In 1970, I told huge Earth Day crowds in Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York: “We won’t appeal anymore to the conscience of institutions because institutions have no conscience. If we want them to do what is right, we must make them do what is right. We will use proxy fights, lawsuits, demonstration, research, boycotts, and-above all-ballots … If we let this become just a fad, it will be our last fad.”

Earth Day organizers created a Dirty Dozen campaign that made “the environment” a voting issue in the 1970 elections. One of the seven Congressmen we defeated that fall was George Fallon, chairman of the House Public Works Committee: the “pork” committee. THAT got their attention. If Chairman Fallon was vulnerable, everyone in politics was vulnerable.

Over the next three years, despite fierce opposition from the most powerful vested interests in the land, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a half-dozen other far-reaching laws that have utterly transformed the way America does business.

Now we must do it again.

What is the goal?

Humanity must swiftly abandon dirty energy sources and switch to safe, clean, decentralized, renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal. The world, led by America, must abandon the appallingly inefficient way it uses energy and swiftly embrace the most efficient new housing, transport, and industrial processes that exist. We Americans must slash our politically risky and economically catastrophic dependence on the oil wealth of nations that don’t like us very much.

A necessary-though not sufficient-common denominator is to establish a price on carbon that reflects the costs of climate disruption, blowing the tops off mountains, and acidifying the world’s oceans. We must place a firm cap with no loopholes on the amount of carbon fuels we consume each year and ratchet that cap down at a prescribed rate every year in the future until we hit something very close to zero.

Only a federal law can accomplish this goal.

If this were easy, we would have begun a quarter century ago. The junk science, climate-denying interest groups are rich, powerful, and ruthless. But sooner or later they will lose.

Sooner is better

They will lose for the same reason that IBM and Control Data lost to Microsoft, Apple, and Dell. They will lose for the same reason that Ma Bell — the most powerful monopoly in the world — lost to cellular upstarts and internet-telephony. They lost because their thinking was anchored in the past instead of envisioning the future

The junk science, climate-disruption-denying interest groups will lose because 19th century answers won’t solve 21st century problems.

Come to the Mall

At some point, this climate-disrupting madness has to start to stop. Come to the Mall between the Capitol Building and the White House on Sunday, April 25. Bring your spouse, your parents, your kids, your neighbors, your friends, your co-workers, your congregation, your bowling league. Vote with your bodies on April 25 at the largest climate rally ever.

And put our political leaders on notice that you will vote with your ballot a few months later!

Elizabeth Kolbert began building a fan base among political junkies with a series of vivid New Yorker profiles that were collected in 2004′s The Prophet of Love. Ranging from George Pataki and Hillary Clinton to Regis Philbin and Al Sharpton, from title character Rudy Giuliani to former Weatherman Kathy Boudin, Kolbert’s pieces were filled with telling details missing from her characters’ celebrity images.

She pulled no punches. Of my friend Mark Green’s mayoral primary win in New York City, she wrote, “Between the fawning and the gloating, the self-promotion and the perfunctory humility, victory celebrations are rarely tasteful affairs.” Still, I found myself developing empathy, and sometimes an unexpected trace of respect, for personalities I had blindly loved or loathed — mostly loathed — as distant caricatures. She made them human.

Kolbert has now done for climate disruption what she did for celebrities. She has taken a topic that many people think of as an impersonal collection of hurricanes, spreading deserts, and rising oceans — or perhaps as two lines crossing on a graph some decades from now — and given it a human face. And, as important, given it urgency.

Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change is an extraordinary piece of reporting. Like Kolbert’s earlier book, most of this one appeared first in the New Yorker. The author visits, among other locations, Alaska, Greenland, Yorkshire, and Oregon — places where people are studying, or simply experiencing, every facet of global warming.

Iceland: soon to be iceless?

Photo: iStockphoto.

Along the way, she hears about its impacts firsthand. She learns that Iceland is losing its ice: “We will have small ice caps on the highest mountains, but the mass of glaciers will have gone,” the head of the Icelandic Glaciological Society tells her. Iceland has had glaciers for at least two million years.

She visits Holland, where the government is beginning to buy out people who live on low-lying land that cannot be saved from rising seas. Holland is also experimenting with floating homes and considering buoyant highways. Bangladesh, by contrast, is simply suffering, and trying to cope with annual migrations much larger than that caused by Katrina.

Kolbert gives even people with whom she disagrees ample opportunity to explain themselves, then deftly dissects their arguments. For example, she explains the origins of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution — adopted by the U.S. Senate 95-0 in 1997 — which said the United States should not comply with Kyoto until the developing world was similarly bound. She describes the formidable political forces that supported the resolution, from Exxon to the AFL-CIO, lucidly and fairly explaining the reasons behind their position.

Then she goes on: “From another perspective, however, the logic of Byrd-Hagel is deeply, even obscenely, self-serving. Suppose for a moment that the total anthropogenic CO2 that can be emitted into the atmosphere were a big ice-cream cake. If the aim is to keep global concentrations below 500 parts per million, then roughly half that cake has already been consumed, and, of that half, the lion’s share has been polished off by the industrialized world. To insist now that all countries cut their emissions simultaneously amounts to advocating that industrialized nations be allocated most of the remaining slices, on the ground that they’ve already gobbled up so much.”

Her three-sentence metaphor lays out with crystal clarity why the Byrd-Hagel response to Kyoto — and the Bush administration’s policy patterned on it — has made Americans so unpopular in so much of the world.

Field Notes works well as an introduction for those who will read just one book on climate, as it deftly weaves in the evolution of the underlying theory and the startling annual accumulation of greenhouse gases measured by the U.S. Weather Bureau at Mauna Loa since 1958. But it is also a wonderful read for those of us who follow the literature pretty closely.

What Kolbert does best is explain things through conversations with experts. These scientists, most of them obscure outside their disciplines but superstars to their peers, are the nameless people behind the reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, NASA’s Goddard Institute, and others. Kolbert brings them alive, describes their oddball peculiarities and scientific achievements, and has them describe what they’ve learned in terms that she — no policy wonk — can understand and convey to the reader. I’ve read most of their reports, but the cumulative impact of their casual conversations is much more frightening than their carefully calibrated journal articles — and that’s saying something.

Rob Socolow, codirector of Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, deftly summarizes the central theme of the book: “I’ve been involved in a number of fields where there’s a lay opinion and a scientific opinion,” he told Kolbert. “And in most cases it’s the lay community that is more exercised, more anxious … But in the climate case, the experts — the people who work with climate models every day, the people who do ice cores — they are more concerned. They are going out of their way to say, ‘Wake up!’”

Elizabeth Kolbert allows them to say “Wake up!” to an audience they would otherwise never reach. For the sake of the planet, I hope that audience, especially in America, is enormous — and that it includes all the political wonks who loved her first book so much.

Ted gets Kerry-ed away.

Photo: Lou Dematteis, Kerry for President.

A mischievous grin spread across John Kerry’s face last week as he was introducing Ted Kennedy, his fellow Massachusetts senator, to an Iowa crowd. It caught my eye because I hadn’t seen Kerry smile for quite a while. “I’m now pleased to introduce,” he said, “the real leader of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party — Ted Kennedy.”

Without rancor, Kerry had popped the empty little balloon that had long been Howard Dean’s biggest applause line. And I thought to myself, He’s back.

As it turns out, Kerry had found his stride, and the results over the next few days were astonishing. Kerry was again inspiring, witty, bold, thoughtful, honest, and smart as hell. He again started connecting with all sorts of people at a gut level. (Kerry has carried the blue-collar vote, and the African-American vote, in every one of his races.) He was, in short, the guy I’d endorsed way back when he first announced his candidacy.

It had been a tough few months. Kerry went from crown prince to yesterday’s news as a result of some early missteps. The talking heads were openly dismissive. Fair-weather friends started jumping ship.

Then Kerry made some decisive staff changes. He looked into his soul and started talking bluntly about why he was running. And with a textbook-perfect campaign, he came from far behind to win Iowa.

As I write this, everything is still volatile. Dean has a lot of money and zealous supporters. John Edwards ran a very good campaign in Iowa and showed unexpected cleverness in his vote-trading deal with Dennis Kucinich. Joe Lieberman has a solid block of votes that Kerry needs in places like Connecticut and Florida. Al Sharpton has targeted a vital block of votes on Super Tuesday. And a lot of old Clinton hands are firming up around Wesley Clark.

Kerry on.

Photo: Kerry for President.

But that sort of volatility brings out Kerry’s strengths. Kerry is always at his best in the closing days of a campaign — and for the next several weeks, he is going to face the closing days of one campaign after another.

Kerry has been my friend for 35 years, and his wife Teresa a close friend for 15 years. I’ve campaigned for him. He’s organized huge Earth Day events for me. We’ve dined and drank late, and I’ve stayed at his home. I’ve had the chance to assess Kerry’s character over the years. What I’m trying to say is that I know this guy, and I trust him.

In 2004, the future of America very much depends upon defeating George W. Bush and electing someone with the capacity for greatness. When historians look back on this period, most of today’s political feeding frenzies will have long since been forgotten. A few big issues — truly presidential issues — will be remembered.

These will certainly include:

• Did America lead the world into a super-efficient, renewable-energy era, ending the oil stranglehold and putting the brake on climate change?

   

• Did America lead a successful effort to guarantee a healthy environment as a fundamental right for everyone?

   

• Did America mount a strong campaign to stop the global epidemic of extinction — the most tragic collapse of biodiversity since the last time an asteroid hit the planet?

   

• Did America elect a president whose judicial nominees preserved the Bill of Rights, respected the traditional separation of powers, and honored res judicata?

   

Any Democratic candidate will be better than George Bush on all these issues. But only Kerry can stand up and discuss each in depth without notes — with a nuanced understanding of science and economics and diplomacy and philosophy — and explain his decisions to the public in simple words that make sense.

No American public official has a stronger, more consistent record on strategic arms control, free speech, civil liberties, fair taxes, racial justice, strong schools, a sound Social Security system, and guaranteed health care than Kerry. And no one has been a stronger, more consistent champion of peace over the last three decades than this hero who was awarded three Purple Hearts. No one has a more legitimate claim to be the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”

And no constituency has more cause to rally to Kerry than environmentalists. With a remarkable 96 percent career environmental voting record (John Muir couldn’t have topped that!), Kerry will be — by far — the strongest environmental president America has ever had.

Furthermore, Teresa Heinz Kerry — who is fluent in five languages and won the 2003 Albert Schweitzer Gold Medal for her leadership on the environment, human rights, health care, childhood education, women’s empowerment around the world, and the arts — will be a wonderful first lady.

I have to confess disappointment in the movement to which I’ve devoted most of my adult years. Environmentalists have not delivered the support that Kerry has earned. Kerry has always been there when we needed him. Today, he needs us.

Kerry — the only candidate who speaks of the environment in every single speech — won in Iowa without the endorsement of a single national environmental group. Yet we are his core constituency. This would be like Jesse Jackson winning without the full-throated support of Black churches, or Gene McCarthy unseating Lyndon Johnson without thousands of anti-war activists slogging through the snow of New Hampshire.

Kerry now has momentum. He was closing the gap with Dean in New Hampshire before the Iowa caucuses, and some polls now show him leaping ahead. But he still faces hard battles. A wave of financial support and busloads of volunteers in the other primary states could put him over the top.

You will never have a chance to support a stronger environmentalist than Kerry for president of the United States. So please, go to JohnKerry.com. Organize a MeetUp. Order some yard signs. Check out his blog. Sign up as a volunteer. Give the campaign some money.

We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to replace the worst environmental president in American history with the best. Seize it!

This piece reflects the opinion of its author and should not be taken to constitute an official endorsement by Grist Magazine, its staff, its board, their psychotherapists, or their aestheticians. We’re so neutral we’re pH-balanced. We make Switzerland look quarrelsome.

The environmental movement has displayed remarkable strength since the first Earth Day in 1970. It has battled heroically to safeguard the world’s health, diversity, and beauty, and it has been astonishingly successful. However, as the Earth’s odometer rolls over into a new century, the Earth is facing a new threat — global warming — that dwarfs earlier perils.

Each one of us can do a number of common-sense things to help combat global warming by reducing dramatically the greenhouse gas emissions from our homes, cars, businesses, schools, and so forth. Still, personal choices are not a substitute for political action. Ultimately, global problems can only be solved through public policies. To tackle global warming, we need to mobilize for a political struggle to change policies governing energy — and we can start with a shift that would give a big boost to solar power.

Buy and Large

One of the most valuable things that government can do in the early stages of a product’s development is to buy it in volume. In field after field, large-scale government procurement has brought down the cost of items as diverse as jet planes, drugs, and computers to the point where the private market could take advantage of them.

The Official Earth Day Guide to
Planet Repair
By Denis Hayes
Island Press, 180 pages, 2000

The government should play a similar role in propelling the energy revolution. Large public-sector commitments to buy wind turbines, biofuels, fuel cells, hydrogen, hypercars, and other elements of a solar future will accelerate the speed at which such products become affordable for the rest of us. We typically think in terms of federal procurement, but state and local governments can play an important role too.

There is no more obvious a candidate for a federal buy-down than solar cells. Lowering the cost of solar cells would provide extraordinary public benefits. Solar cells make electricity, but they consume no fuel, produce no pollution, generate no radioactive waste, have long lifetimes, contain no moving parts, and require little maintenance. They can be fashioned mostly from silicon, which is the second most abundant element in the Earth’s crust. Solar cells produce zero carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas.

Unfortunately, solar cells are not yet cheap enough to compete with heavily subsidized fossil fuels. Although the price of solar cells already has fallen about 40-fold, this technology remains roughly three times too expensive to achieve skyrocketing growth as a power source in the United States.

For a quarter-century, affordable solar cells have been the environmental brass ring, lying just outside the grasp of those who favor green power. Governmental procurement could lower their price to the point where they will take off on their own in the private sector. A comparison of the experiences of computer chips and solar cells vividly illustrates the value of government procurement in bringing new products to market.

Throwing a Curve

New technologies follow predictable learning curves. As production volumes increase, costs fall. For example, a product with an 80-percent learning curve will experience a 20-percent price drop when the volume is doubled. If production is doubled again, the price will decline an additional 20 percent.

Out with the old, in with the new.

Photo: NREL/PIX.

This is common sense. If I gave you a pile of raw materials and said, make me a car, it would cost a fortune (and it probably would not be a very good car). If car-making grows into a cottage industry, prices will fall — perhaps into the range of a hand-built Ferrari. When volumes swell and you are manufacturing tens of thousands of cars per year, the marginal cost of making one more car will be very low.

Solar cells are currently at the cottage industry scale. A single nuclear power plant produces 25 times as much electricity in a year as will all the solar cells sold in the entire world last year. Of course solar cells remain expensive!

Until the solar-cell industry can leap to the next stage — mass production — all the investments the public has made in research and engineering will be left dangling.

When the Chips Were Down

The solar industry should learn from the experience of the electronics industry. Consider, for example, the history of the integrated circuit. In 1961, Texas Instruments began producing integrated circuits for small, specialized applications. The earliest versions were very expensive. They cost $100 but replaced just a couple dollars’ worth of larger electronics, perhaps two transistors and three resistors. There was essentially no market for such devices in the private sector. Other electronics companies sneered at them.

But the American military recognized the potential importance of small, lightweight, low-power integrated circuits. The Department of Defense began to purchase integrated circuits in large quantities. Following a learning curve, the price fell dramatically. As the price fell, numerous private market niches opened up. Soon, the cost of integrated circuits fell to the point where private markets developed explosively. In just six years, the price of integrated circuits plummeted 95 percent and an enormous commercial market developed.

In 1971, Intel introduced the first central processing unit (CPU). The early CPUs were not immediately transformational. They were too simple to power anything beyond a calculator. However, those calculations rapidly became more and more sophisticated. By the mid-1970s, microprocessors were performing computations for small computers.

Continuing price drops could then be driven by private demand. The processing power of CPUs has continued to double every 18 months (as famously predicted by the chairman emeritus of Intel, Gordon Moore). Accompanied by falling costs, this led directly to the information revolution.

Integrated circuits are now dirt cheap and CPUs are ubiquitous in our homes, cars, and workplaces. But if the government had not purchased huge quantities of chips before they were cheap enough for commercial applications, the technology might never have become cost-effective. The information revolution would have been delayed, perhaps indefinitely.

Cost Cutting

The same basic economic approach would work for solar cells (which, coincidentally, are made of the same semiconductor materials as computer chips). Every time the volume of solar cells has increased in the past, the cost has fallen. Convincing evidence shows that this learning curve will continue as it has with computer chips. The consumer market already is there, just waiting for the price of solar cells to drop. Every poll ever conducted on the issue concludes that most Americans would prefer to get their energy from the sun, if only they could afford to.

Sunshine on my solar cell makes
me happy.

Photo: NREL/PIX.

Put simply, a n
ational program to spend $5 billion over the next four years could make solar cells commercially viable for a significant portion of all new electrical generation worldwide. An announcement that the government will buy $1 billion worth of solar cells in 2001 at an inflation-indexed price of $3.50/watt; $1 billion worth in 2002 at $2.50/watt; $1 billion worth in 2003 at $1.50/watt; and $2 billion worth in 2004 at $1.00/watt would catapult America back into the global lead in solar energy. (If the new president makes it a priority, the entire program could be completed in his first term.)

The economic consequences of a program designed to reduce the price of solar cells would all be positive. Such an initiative would open a large, new global market for American technology and create a rich new source of American jobs.

When the price of a product is lowered due to bulk orders from the government, the change is permanent. Unlike, say, taxes and tax credits, economies of mass production cannot be repealed. Part of the beauty of this approach is that, after just a few years, as with computer chips, no additional government subsidy is required.

The program is risk-free. If no company steps forward to sell the equipment at those prices, the program will not cost a cent. But if some companies are able and willing to meet the challenge, the impact on the world will be revolutionary.