Five sixths of the world energy budget in the year 2025 can be met by solar technologies, claimed Hayes in 1978. All you need, wrote the great solar expert, is 70 billion square meters of solar collectors, 5 million wind turbines, a quadrupling of the world's hydropower, and 15% of the world's forests for biomass.
That's all! As a reader's letter in The New Scientist (England, 6/22/78) pointed out, these (grossly underestimated) figures imply a land area greater than all of Australia, and 5% of the world's surface area including Antarctica. Small is beautiful!
But since then, Hayes has become director of the Solar Energy Research Institute, and to help him with the arithmetic he has appointed other scientists to the SERI Advisory Board: Robert Redford's wife Lola, for example, a scientist in Hayes' own class; and Ralph Nader's sister Laura; and John Bryson, president of the California Public Utility Commission, which has not produced a solitary kilowatt-hour of solar energy, but has stamped out coal and nuclear by the gigawatt. The chairman of this entire panel of experts advising a scientific institute is Audubon president Russell W. Peterson, one of America's most successful energy stiflers.
|
Vol. 8, No. 1
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 8 Issue/No.: Vol. 8, No. 1 Date: September 01, 1980 04:03 PM Title: The next victim is decency
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
|