It wasn’t just noble sentiments that Carter offered in the leadup to the 1980 election, however. In fact, in the wake of the oil shocks, his main policy proposal was for solar power. His main domestic-policy adviser, Stuart Eizenstat, told him that “a strong solar message and program will be important in trying to counter the hopelessness which polls are showing the public feels about energy. . . . I’m quite convinced Congress and the American people want a Manhattan-type project on alternative energy development.” Carter agreed and started proposing measures designed to make sure that, by the year 2000, a fifth of the country’s energy would come from solar power. He called for spending a hundred million dollars in fiscal year 1980 to create a solar bank. He asked for additional hundreds of millions to fund solar projects and research, and offered a billion dollars in tax credits to homeowners who wanted to put panels on their roofs or install wind-energy systems. He declared May 3, 1978, to be Sun Day, and delivered a speech (in a driving rain—he was characteristically unlucky) from a federal solar-research facility in Golden, Colorado. “The question is no longer whether solar energy works,” he said. “We know it works. The only question is how to cut costs so that solar power can be used more widely and so that it will set a cap on rising oil prices.” He continued, “Nobody can embargo sunlight. No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air. It will not poison our waters. It’s free from stench and smog. The sun’s power needs only to be collected, stored, and used.”
Carter was correct. Had we embarked on an enormous project of solar research then and there, we could have cut the costs of renewable energy far faster than we did. There was no single technological breakthrough that finally lowered the cost of solar power below that of fossil fuel in the past decade, just a long series of iterative improvements that could have come much faster had we worked with the vigor of, say, the Manhattan Project. Instead, Reagan immediately cut the budget for solar research by eighty-five per cent and did away with the tax credit for solar panels, decimating the infant industry. His national-security adviser, Richard Allen, told Reagan about a book denigrating solar energy, whose author had claimed that it was “little more than a continuation of the political wars of a decade ago by other means. . . . Where salvation was once to be gotten from the Revolution, now it will come from everyone’s best friend, that great and simplistic cure of all energy ills, the sun.” The culture war against clean energy had begun.