100 Objects #24: White House Solar Panels

In June 1979, President Jimmy Carter stood on the White House roof beside 32 large black solar hot-water panels. Unlike photovoltaic panels, they ran water through a black-backed window pane and heated it, but Bill McKibben says the technology worked extremely well. Carter predicted that a generation later the panels might be a curiosity, a museum piece, or a symbol of a road not taken—or a small part of a great American adventure. They became nearly all of those first possibilities. Roman Mars frames the episode around why Americans saw a technology promising cheap, abundant energy and largely shrugged.

Carter inherited an America built around cheap oil: postwar highways and suburban growth had made the country consume roughly a third of the world’s oil. OPEC’s 1973 embargo quadrupled crude prices, producing gasoline lines that McKibben, then a teenage newspaper reporter, covered in his small town. President Nixon lowered the national speed limit to 55 miles per hour and considered banning Sunday pleasure driving. By 1977, another oil shock was approaching, while a severe winter and natural-gas shortages added pressure. Carter therefore treated renewable energy primarily as a way to reduce foreign dependence, not as a climate-change policy.

In a February 1977 television address, Carter said the energy shortage was permanent and could not be solved quickly. Sitting in a cardigan beside a fire, he urged Americans to keep thermostats at 65 degrees during the day and 55 at night, arguing that this alone could eliminate half the natural-gas shortage. McKibben describes Carter as treating citizens as mature participants who needed to stop wasting energy and accept a smaller, less consumption-driven life. Admirers saw seriousness; critics mocked the sweater and viewed conservation as un-American because it challenged an ideal of abundance and personal expansion.

When Carter returned to the White House roof in 1979, he placed solar power within a broader plan involving wind and hydropower. His proposed goal was for renewable sources to produce 20 percent of America’s electricity by 2000. Yet his pollster found the country divided into thirds: one group opposed further economic growth for ecological reasons, one wanted growth at full speed, and one did not know what it wanted. McKibben says Carter’s message fit none cleanly: he did not sell solar primarily as environmentalism or economic expansion, and he did not force the undecided public toward either choice.

The 1980 election gave Ronald Reagan a decisive answer to Carter’s restraint. Reagan argued that conservation alone was not an energy policy and promised that the lights would not dim or industry stop; his approach was “drill, drill, drill.” More drilling increased American oil supply and brought prices down, directly rebutting Carter. McKibben contrasts Carter’s New Deal-style belief that Americans could work together and accept sacrifices with Reagan’s exaltation of the individual. America, he says, no longer viewed itself as a group project. Carter’s presidency became a warning about a politician who had asked too much of the public.

After Reagan’s 1984 reelection, his administration cut funding for new solar research, and America’s young solar industry suffered a major collapse with thousands of layoffs. The White House panels then disappeared without a public announcement; insiders reportedly treated solar power as a joke. Their removal was politically consistent with Reagan’s rejection of Carter’s energy vision, but it also fulfilled Carter’s prediction that they could become a museum piece. For decades, the panels symbolized a path the United States had consciously declined, while Carter himself was remembered in political culture as an example of failed leadership—even though his post-presidency later transformed his reputation.

McKibben’s journalism made him reconsider the physical consequences of energy use. For a New Yorker article, he traced the origins of everything in his apartment, traveling to Brazil, the Arctic, and other locations, and realized that suburban life hid how the material world operated. He then followed emerging climate science and published The End of Nature in 1989, the first climate-change book aimed at a general audience. But he later concluded that journalists had spent too long believing evidence would prevail. Exxon’s scientists made temperature predictions for 2020 that were remarkably accurate, and the company even raised drilling rigs for anticipated sea-level rise; fossil-fuel companies knew the science but funded denial.

After founding 350.org with seven Middlebury College students, McKibben organized 5,100 climate protests in 181 countries in 2009. He then proposed putting solar panels on world leaders’ residences, including returning Carter’s panels to the White House. Unity College in Maine had acquired some from a government warehouse; students demonstrated that the panels still produced hot water by pouring water into one and waiting for steam. McKibben and students drove a panel to Washington in a biodiesel van, stopping in Boston, New York, and Baltimore or Washington for rallies. Obama administration officials listened for 90 minutes but would not accept the symbolism.

McKibben believes the Obama officials rejected the old panels because Jimmy Carter still represented political failure, not because the technology failed: the 1970s panel still worked, so why not put it back? Obama’s second term later provided federal incentives for solar and eventually placed new panels on the White House roof, though none were Carter’s originals. That delay marked a change in the political meaning of solar. The administration could embrace renewable energy once it was no longer tied to Carter’s unpopular image, and the White House could claim the symbolism without literally restoring the abandoned objects.

McKibben says solar has become the world’s cheapest energy source: each time the number of solar panels doubles, their price falls another 25 percent. Unlike fossil fuels, sunlight is effectively inexhaustible and does not require increasingly difficult extraction. He cites Pakistan, where unreliable and expensive electricity, access to Chinese panels, and YouTube instructions led millions of people to build the equivalent of about half the national grid in eight months. Globally, he says, 95 percent of new electric generation in the previous year came from sun and wind. Yet the United States has removed federal incentives and restricted solar on federal lands.

Carter’s 20-percent renewable-electricity target for 2000 was not met; in 2025, renewable energy represented less than 10 percent of America’s total energy generation. McKibben says solar can no longer prevent all climate change because the world waited too long, but every tenth of a degree avoided keeps roughly 100 million people from moving into a more dangerous climate zone. The old panels matter because a tangible object preserves the memory of an unrealized national adventure. America could still participate with government support, he says, but it will not lead the solar transition: it is no longer the protagonist of the future it once announced.