Solar energy has fascinated inventors since cheap plate glass became available in the late 19th century, so why hasn’t that innovation translated into greater adoption?
That’s the question that Frank Laird attempts to answer in his post-World War II history of solar energy policy, Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values, published by Cambridge University Press in 2004.
I discovered the book after a talk with Frank’s wife, the impressive and kind, Pamela Laird, a historian of technology at the University of Colorado, Denver. (You can check out her book, too, which deals with “networking success since Benjamin Franklin.”)
25 pages into the weighty tome, I’ve already picked up several excellent historical tidbits and some new ways of thinking about the problems of energy innovation. Here is a sort of open reading of the pieces of the book I’ve found interesting.
Laird describes Langdon Winner’s useful intellectual framework, “technology as legislation”:
Winner argues that certain technological ensembles — large systems that produce major goods and services such as food, energy, transportation, and communications — are more than mere tools. They are constitutive parts of modern life.
Laird also raises a political question that I’ve thought a lot about.
“Why were the values associated with solar technologies so anathema to conservatives?” Laird asks.
My gut reaction had always been to blame the drop-out hippies of the 60s and 70s for promoting solar as an alternative to the industrial scheme of America, but I’m looking forward to Laird spreading the responsibility a little wider.
“In earlier decades solar technologies had been championed by conservative advocates, and understanding how solar came to have particular values imputed to it requires a much longer and deeper historical perspective,” he concludes.
It’s kind of amazing to think of political conservatives promoting solar energy, even though it’s got to make sense to Jeffersonian Republicans intent on preserving (at least) the vision agrarian life. Now I’m hungry to find old-school conservatives who were big on alternative energy. Where are the old men with large side burns and three-piece suits, pocket watches danging at their sides, who argued against the merits of fossil fuels? Those are the stories that the green movement needs to build a bigger tent.
Image: Popular Mechanics via Modern Mechanix
January 11, 2009 at 2:44 am
[...] Madrigal, inspired by initial readings of a Frank Laird book, recently posted an interesting blog that, at least preliminarily, explored the fact that solar technology — or at least the [...]