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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Bonefish who wrote (899151)11/6/2015 11:16:33 AM
From: Wharf Rat1 Recommendation

Recommended By
Sam

   of 1570737
 
I know I was pissed when Raygun gave away our solar technology to the Germans and Chinese.

short version... "Reagan said, 'Go away with this shit of renewables.' And that was that."
long version...

"Your President Jimmy Carter was the first politician to promote an industrial revolution with renewables," Fell said when we met in his Berlin office in April. "I looked to the USA in the 1970s. There was wind power in California and solar power on the White House. I thought, 'Oh, this is wonderful! Why can't we have this in Germany?'"

For a time, the United States led the world in developing renewable energy. At one point the Carter administration's Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) made the dream of a renewable energy economy so real that it set off alarms in the oil-rich countries of the Middle East.

"The big powers are seriously trying to find alternatives to oil by seeking to draw energy from the sun," Saudi Arabia's oil minister Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani warned his colleagues. "We hope to God they will not succeed quickly because our position in that case will be painful."

Four years later, Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan. The new administration considered SERI a prime example of what it derided as "solar socialism." The budget of the world's leading solar institute was slashed and before long it was back to (oil) business as usual.

As Fell tells it: "Reagan said, 'Go away with this shit of renewables.' And that was that."

A generation of Germans picked up the renewable torch that the Reagan administration tossed aside and bought up SERI-produced patents at fire-sale prices. The renewable energy revolution didn't end. It moved overseas and was renamed die Energiewende.

bloomberg.com
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