# The Prospect of Solar Power: California’s Energy Czar Speaks Out, An LR Interview **URL:** **By** Wilson Clark **Published:** August 1, 1979 --- “Clark became interested in libertarianism in the early ’60s through Ludwig von Mises’s famous seminars in economics at New York University.” With lines forming at gas stations coast to coast, the price per gallon hovering (temporarily?) at around a dollar, and every day’s paper bringing fresh news of government and industry slip-ups, foul-ups and cover-ups in the management of nuclear power, it’s obvious that energy is shaping up as a top issue for the 1980 presidential campaign. Yet to date, only one major candidate for either of the major party nominations has adopted an energy policy which calls for anything besides business as usual. That single exception is the politically enigmatic (some would say chameleonic) Governor of California, Edmund G. Brown, Jr. Within hours of the near meltdown at Three Mile Island this past Spring, Jerry Brown became the first big establishment politician to jump on the anti-nuclear bandwagon, demanding that the power plant at Rancho Seco in California (a near twin of the Babcock and Wilcox reactor which had been crippled in Pennsylvania) be shut down immediately, and flying to Washington a few weeks later to share star billing with Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader at a mammoth anti-nuke rally. He was back in Washington again, a month later, explaining to President Carter why California needed increased allotments of gasoline (because it had grown a few energy sizes larger since the federal system of allotting fuel had been devised). And the following month he was explaining to the national media why the President’s newly announced commitment to the development of solar power was “too little too late”—for all that it _was_ on the right track, the only track which would ever lead us permanently away from our present dependence on fossil fuels. The man behind Jerry Brown’s stylish, new, up-to-the-minute energy rhetoric is his special Assistant for Issues and Planning, Wilson Clark—a former journalist and libertarian political activist of the ’60s who has come in off the street, donned a coat and tie, and tried his hand at influencing government a little more directly. Clark became interested in libertarianism in the early ’60s through Ludwig von Mises’s famous seminars in economics at New York University. He became friendly with Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess and with certain of the writers and intellectuals in the circle surrounding Ayn Rand. He pursued a political science degree at the University of North Carolina, then drifted into journalism. In 1969 he found himself editing a technical newsletter called _Energy Conversion Digest_ and publishing articles about new technology developments like photovoltaic cells—thin slivers of chemically treated silicon or cadmium which can convert the sun’s radiation directly into electrical current. Clark began to wonder why an idea like this wasn’t being used outside the aerospace industry. It obviously worked: panels of such cells provided all the electric power for all the U.S.’s many manned space capsules, satellites and stations. Why wasn’t this technology being promoted, rather than nuclear power? Clark began reading more widely about energy, and, inevitably, he began writing about what he discovered. In 1971 he published one of the first public articles on what has since come to be known as the China Syndrome. In 1974 he published _Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinc_\- _tion_, an impressive, encyclopedic introduction to the entire field. In 1976 he went to work for Jerry Brown. To find out what sort of home a libertarian with a fondness for solar power might make for himself in the Brown administration, and what sort of solar future such an energy czar might have in mind for the rest of us, LR sent executive editor Jeff Riggenbach to Sacramento in June for some candid conversation with Wilson Clark. Clark’s office is two crowded rooms in a tree-shaded two story Spanish building across a busy Sacramento street from the Governor’s office. The walls are lined with books and files and plastered with posters, bumperstickers and cartoons extolling the virtues of “sun power.” We decided to begin our conversation by coming directly to the point. LR: Is solar energy the technology that is most likely to provide us with a satisfactory long-range solution to the energy crisis? Clark: It may be. It seems to be. In many areas of this country, which enjoy a pretty moderate climate, solar energy could supply basic heating needs and, in the future, cooling needs. And about a third of all the energy we use is used for such purposes. To heat a house, you don’t need electricity. LR: Some advocates of solar power argue that the electricity you _do_ need in your home could be generated within your home, so that there’d be no further need for central generating plants and networks of power lines connecting them to houses and businesses. They envision a “There are people today who make outrageous claims about solar energy which are very similar to the claims made by nuclear proponents in the ’50s.” future in which every building is equipped with solar collectors on its roof to supply the power for heating and cooling and cooking food, and panels of photovoltaic cells on its roof to supply the electrical current to run hairdryers and stereo systems. Is this kind of thing really feasible? Clark: It may happen. But one of the lessons I try to encourage politicians to understand is that you can write many laws and come up with many theories, but you cannot change the laws of thermodynamics. Now the problem with solar is that it takes a lot of energy to build collectors, and it takes a lot of energy to make a silicon cell. Some studies show that with current methods of manufacturing, the energy required to go into this equipment may take 30 to 40 years to amortize, to get back out again with the sun. And if the cell lasted only 15 years, you’d be in a hell of a mess. Your society would be putting more energy into building the new technology than it was getting out. The net energy principle is very important to keep in mind. It’s vital. The ideal future, the ideal kind of social and political development would be toward just the kind of decentralization you describe. But we don’t know, we being the technologists and planners, we don’t know if it’s going to be technologically possible. There are many unanswered questions. Can you bring the cost down? Can you develop the new technologies that can do that? You could install the solar energy system you’ve described today. Forget the energy cost of a couple of hundred thousand dollars. You could do your house today for that amount, and spend another $50,000 on batteries, and then every five years replace the batteries. You could do it, but it’d be stupid. It would never go anywhere except as a novelty. The costs have to be brought down. There are some people in society today who make outrageous claims about solar energy which are very similar to the claims made by the nuclear proponents in 1955. That’s when they said that with nuclear reactors, electricity would be too cheap to meter. Now we know that it’s the most expensive form of energy that anybody will ever pay for. Well, the same thing could happen with solar. No one knows. No one can answer your question. Anyone who would answer you, “sure, in 20 years we’re going to have this thing on the roof,” is either a liar or a knave to attempt to give you an answer like that, because no one knows. What we should be doing as a society is putting a great deal of funding into a hundred different research areas. Maybe 97 of them won’t pan out, but the three that do will enable us to move into the future. These new energy systems should be run by the private sector. But the problem now is that the private sector is not investing anywhere near the amount of money required in research to get enough options on the table. LR: Why is that? Clark: I don’t know. But I saw an interview a couple of years ago in _Business Week_ that may cast some light on that. The interviewee was an official of the Shell Oil Company, and he was asked why their commitment to research and development expenditures had been dropping as a percentage of their profit, and he said, “Well, we’re a mature company.” And he was asked, “What do you mean by that?” And he said, “Well, we’re a petroleum company, and we’ve done about everything we can in this area. We’ve matured. So we’re just not spending any more money.” There’s no real interest. The traditional energy corporations have become giant monopolistic institutions which have been basically stripped of their creativity. “We’re a mature company. We don’t have to invest in alternatives.” That’s the same as saying, “Well, I’m about to die, why should I do anything?” Then there’s the inordinate amount of time and money the government has spent beefing up and building up the non-renewable fuels as industries. There have been several rather detailed studies done for the Department of Energy by the Battelle Laboratories—studies of non-renewable sources of energy like coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium. They have found that between $200-billion and $250-billion have been expended in direct and indirect federal subsidies on these energy sources, probably more than that. That’s $1000 for every man, woman and child in this country. That’s $3000, $4000, $5000 per family already spent before that family even begins paying its energy bills. The most logical thing to do about this part of the problem would be for the government just to back out of the energy subsidizing business completely and let everything else— including solar power—rise. But practically, I think one would have to moderate that. On the one hand I do not want to see the government involved in developing new energy sources, because I don’t think the government can manage them any better than it’s managed the nuclear industry. If the federal government ran all the gas stations it’d be worse even than the post office. On the other hand I see the reluctance of the private sector—partly induced by decades of government subsidies—to invest in development of alternative energy technologies. And I wonder: are we going to have enough energy of any kind to run the civilization on? LR: Won’t the market insure a steady supply of energy? Once we’ve exhausted the easily obtainable, cheaply obtainable reserves of oil and gas, won’t the price go up so that it becomes economical to think in terms of extracting oil from shale and investing in alternative sources of energy? Clark: That’s true. The logic of your argument is indisputable. The problem is it’s a game of Russian Roulette. The time when you need to make investments in new energy sources is when there is still abundant energy from the old source—enough to take care of your ordinary energy needs and provide the energy to develop the new source of energy. If you wait too long, you come to a point where it would take all the energy in the system just to keep it running until it literally falls apart. Thirty years ago, an oil well was maybe a thousand feet deep. Today, that same new well is 20,000 feet deep. Now we have more advanced technology, certainly: better drill bits and all kinds of other devices that can be used to go deeper after more oil. But it takes a lot more energy to pump a resource from 20,000 feet than it does from 1,000 feet. We used to just punch a hole in the ground and natural pressure would put the oil into the air. Now we have to suck it out of the ground, and the cost keeps getting higher and higher. LR: What do you think the role of government should be? What do you think of tax credits, which make it possible for people to save on their taxes if they want to put their investment capital into solar energy? Clark: That’s exactly the kind of thing I would do. The most important thing this state government has done, in fact, is establish a tax credit in solar, because in doing it we’ve stimulated an industry. We now have 40 percent of the solar manufacturing in the United States in California—10 percent of the population and 40 percent of the industry. And I think we’ll get more here. We’re going to have the biggest international industry here. Another of the things that we’ve discussed here is Jerry Brown’s proposal for the state of an excess profits tax. However, any energy conservation or production-related activities of oil companies would be exempted from that tax. Let’s look at that for a moment. This means that if companies are interested in diversifying into supermarkets or casinos or hot dog chains or Frisbee manufacturers, then they’d be taxed and that tax would go into future energy production or conservation-related activities. But if those companies chose to diversify more of their funding into alternative sources of energy or increased production from conventional sources or conservation, they wouldn’t be taxed. There’s no reason why a law cannot be used—this is not a law yet, it’s proposed legislation—but if such legislation could be enacted it would channel more of the resources of the free market, of the private sector, into legitimate new-energy activities. This would be far preferable to having the government run things. We’ve also had a design competition. That’s one of the cheapest things a government can do—have a competition. Here’s a little pot of money that you can use to reward innovation and get more people and especially builders thinking about alternatives in energy. It’s a time-honored practice. And it works. You get a lot of creativity and innovation and ideas at very minimal cost. For the cost of pruning three or four bureaucrats for a year, you get good competition and a lot of good ideas. Another thing that we’re pushing for in the state of California and I think is a sensible policy, is called the Renewable Energy Investment Fund. This would be a source of funding money that would be raised by the state in excess of $500-million in the next five years. It could be used as a source of venture capital pooling, so that the state could co-venture with small businesses, or large businesses, or even entities such as communities for new innovative energy projects involving better use of natural resources. We must as a nation find novel ways of forcing very uncreative businesses into a more creative posture. Of course, this is an attitude that is anathema to theological libertarians who don’t understand that business can be just as boring as government. LR: Do you still think of yourself as a libertarian? Clark: Oh absolutely. But I’m not a theological libertarian. I mean, the reason I work for Jerry Brown is because he has come closer to a reasonable energy policy for the nation than any other political figure I’ve ever met. I do not particularly enjoy government, and I will not spend my life in government. But it’s been an interesting assignment. I don’t know that I will be here two more years or two more months—that’s irrelevant. What is important is that if you’re going to be dealing in modern society to any degree, you can’t ignore the fact that government exists. I do not necessarily believe that government can be made better. I do think that one of the things we can do is eliminate unnecessary government programs, and that’s my major commitment here. If you look at the energy policies of the Democrats and Republicans alike, most of them are centralist, statist energy policies. They make the presumption that the flow of power is pyramidal, that the people at the top are the wisest and they can rule things for everybody else. When Jerry hired me, we discussed libertarianism and my attitude about government. I told him I’d never worked for a government entity before, and I was not particularly excited about this one. But I became convinced, as a result of meeting and speaking with him, that he was very sincerely advocating what I would consider to be probably not a libertarian approach so much as a Jeffersonian approach. He’s a Jeffersonian as opposed to a Hamiltonian. He’s on the right track. And there has been a whole group of people who are very free market oriented, people who are, I would say, virtually free market anarchists and libertarians, who have found a comfortable philosophical home with Jerry Brown, a number of very iconoclastic people. We don’t like government, but we’re realists. We live in a real world. Government exists. And rather than ignore it, we would like in some way to deflect it. We don’t want to wake up in an Orwellian world where 99 percent of our life is controlled by the government. And what we have done here in the past two or three years is to develop energy policies for this state government which have not resulted in vast new bureaucracies but have resulted in incentive systems for alternative energy sources, for more localized decision making. We have cracked a lot of codes and laws and regulations that were set up in the “60s by people like Ronald Reagan, who is as big a statist as anyone who ever existed. He mortgaged a lot of the future with policies that were rhetorically right wing but in fact very statist. A lot of the things we’ve done have reversed that. But I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not justifying, nor would I want to justify a substantial portion of the efforts of any government, state or local or federal. In fact I think we can’t. We’re going to have to learn to live with a lot less government. We’re going to have to learn that human creativity and innovation occurs only through individual efforts, and that therefore somehow we have to take these institutions that have become gigantic creations of ineptitude, and start breaking them down into more creative, smaller units. The problem is not in reaching an ideal future—we can all be idealists—the problem is in getting from here to there. What kind of transition is going to build that kind of energy policy, that kind of future? And I don’t think that sitting back in the ivory tower dreaming—whether you’re a Marxist, or a liberal or a libertarian—is going to get us there. Very few people are involved in building the future except the centralists. The statists are very much involved. The bureaucrats are involved because they’d like to get a pension at the end of 50 years for doing nothing but moving pencils around a desk, and the same is true of the bureaucrats of a lot of major corporations. LR: How about energy conservation? How does it fit into your vision of how the future could be? Clark: It’s a key component. The energy crisis is basically a physical resource problem. We have used the richest energy resources already, and the ones we have left, the fossil fuels and uranium, are more and more scattered and diffuse. It takes more and more energy to go after them, look for them, process them, mine them, use them. One answer to this problem is obviously conservation. And one of the best kinds of conservation is the passive use of solar energy. For example, in my home I don’t have an air conditioner. I live in Sacramento. I get hot some days of the year, but I don’t like air conditioners. However, I have done things to my house, such as putting awnings on all the south facing windows and adding extra insulation in the roof, and I’ve added a screened porch to the back of the house, so I can open it up and get a natural breeze coming through, and reduced the summer temperature in my home by 15 degrees. It cost me $140.00. I would have spent that much money on two months’ bills for air conditioning. In California we could probably save 25 percent of our electricity just by having commercial buildings and stores and people’s homes use more insulation and awnings. For an investment of a few hundred dollars per home, you could save 25 percent of the projected needs of new power plants. And that amounts to a lot of power plants. We’re talking about 20 nuclear power plants, for example. It’s a lot cheaper way, also, for the homeowner or businessman to get cooling. Another energy-saving method of cooling off is trees. Trees are the most efficient solar collectors in the state of California, because our peak needs are for cooling energy, not for heat energy. And so anything you can do to get more natural cooling, more use of solar energy, makes sense. Deciduous trees are very sensible because they shed their leaves in the winter when you need more solar heat. It’s a perfect answer to plant trees. It’s an architectural use of solar energy. If you redesign houses and have much more logical procedures of building housing, to minimize the energy needs; that is, if you build in such a way as to harmonize with the environment according to the natural flow of solar energy and wind energy which is a byproduct of solar in that environment, that’s one enormously important way of saving energy at almost no cost. Our work cycles can also be adapted better to sunlight. Millions of people around the world take a siesta. Their office hours are reversed, so people don’t have to work in the heat of the day. That way, you adjust your hours to the sun cycle. You use solar energy in a lifestyle sense. When it’s really hot, you don’t work. You work when it’s cool. You work earlier in the mornings and later in the evenings, and everybody takes off in the middle of the day. That’s one way of relating to solar energy that also happens to save an enormous amount of energy. Sometimes as much as half your entire utility system is designed for a peak period of energy use, and if you can convince people, or people make a decision, to avoid using energy during that particular peak hour of the day, you don’t need half your entire system. Why should you invest all the resources and technology in building half of a giant, integrated system if you really don’t need it except for one hour a day? Passive solar and techniques of living with the flow of nature cost almost no money. They also create negligible pollution of any kind, because basically you’re adapting yourself to a much less energy-intensive lifestyle. You have tremendous savings of pollution. LR: Do you experience comparable pollution savings with active solar power—the collectors and panels on rooftops we were talking about earlier? Clark: Not really. In fact, in the ultimate decentralized system, in which every home was a castle and had its own array of energy equipment, you might generate as much pollution as we have today from a more centralized system. It takes a lot of energy and releases a lot of pollutants into the ecosystem to make all the metal, do all the anodizing, make all the glass to equip a house to make full active use of solar power. If you try to put everything on every house, you’re going to wind up with a lot of material transfer in your resource technological system. You’d get less pollution from a hybrid system where you had some centralized solar generation on a community scale or even larger, and some decentralized use of solar power as well. You’d still have some pollution because of the manufacture of the equipment, but you could minimize it because you weren’t trying to replicate all that copper and metal in every single home. If you want the least possible pollution, you go with the natural flow of solar energy. With current technology, you can build a house that uses only eight percent of the energy used in conventional housing today. It doesn’t cost much more to build. It doesn’t even look too different. It certainly doesn’t require any real modifications of lifestyle. And it’s a lot cheaper to operate. But by the turn of the next century we’re going to be living with 85 percent of the housing stock we have today. That’s why you need a lot of programs to teach people how to reduce cooling loads and heating loads and how to use more directed heating. The way things are now, we do not live like other animals in the natural system. We’re not, in a certain sense, dependent, the way they are, on today’s sunlight for our lives. In this office right now, we’re running off sunlight that hit the earth a billion years ago. We mine our energy. Other animals are much more conservative. Every other kind of animal is very finely attuned and adapted to its environment and the energy flow of that environment. Everything is living off the natural system, everything conserves energy—all kinds of plants and animals, but us. It’s a very important point. If we’re going to get out of that, if we’re going to make the social leap in our evolution from being miners of energy to being creatures that live within an organized daily flow of solar energy, it means some pretty big decisions. It’s going to mean some pretty big changes in the pattern and organization of life. And it’ll mean personal change. It very well may mean a more cooperative type of lifestyle. It’s an enormous social transition, and we might have to scramble to make the jump. Right now, no one is really making the kind of massive commitment we need to windpower or solar energy or any of the things that run off the natural world.