SOLAR ECONOMICS II

He usually springs from the loins of one of the obstructionist organizations such as the $2.9 million/year Natural Resources Defense Council whose unadmitted, but factual, policy is to ensure that the upper crusts of society will not be bothered by the economic growth and upward mobility of the common riff-raff. They used to be funded by the nickels and dimes of the little people, such as the $4,735,000 contributed by the Rockefeller Foundation, but they have now moved on to the greener pastures of the US Treasury, which they tap in several ways.

When the object is naked power only, they move into the government administration (the NRDC's Tony Roisman, a distinguished member of this Herrenvolk, has just moved over to the Justice Department), while the lesser fry raids the treasury as "intervenors;" for the government has now passed from inept interference in the economy to actively financing its obstruction and strangulation.

But if unbridled power is less important than wampum, green and plentiful, milk the taxpayer as a soft-energy consultant. Large exorbitant fees for studies which everybody quotes and nobody reads, and which always end with the firm and unequivocal conclusion that more study is needed to reach a firm and unequivocal conclusion. "Passive solar design," for example, is a veritable gold mine. It is a buzzword for sophisticated arrangements like deciduous trees south of a home, which shade it in the summer, but let the sun through in the winter. How come this was known to every homesteader in the prairies without a Department of Energy to tell him? Ah, now here is another problem that needs further intensive study...

While Washington, D.C., is the main trough sustaining this fleece enterprise system, there are also pastures in state capitals to be grazed. Genuine investigative reporters will find many a story in the ledgers of what was shelled out to whom for what. Frank Adams of the Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune is such a reporter, and in a survey (12/16/79) he reports the secondhighest fee ever paid to a contractor, a psychiatrist who shrinks the heads of state prisoners: $300.50 a day plus travel. And the highest? Well, if it wasn't our old friend Amory Lovins, who was eking out a living in Helena, charging $500 for one day's consultation on (beginners, note the subject!) How to produce a renewable energy study such that the Montana Dept. of Natural Resources might get a federal grant. He left no written trace of his wisdom, but what would you want for a mere $500?