White House goes green with solar panels – again, again and again 

It is the year two thousand and ten… and President Barack Obama orders installation of additional solar panels and a solar hot water heater at the White House^[9]

Guardian ” The move by Obama’s administration follows lobbying by green campaigners, who called on the president to reinstate solar on the White House and have been driving around the US in a biodiesel-powered van with one of the original panels installed by Carter.

Last month they visited the White House, which declined the symbolic request to fit the old panel. Neither did it commit to installing new panels.

Bill McKibben, who led the campaign, said he welcomed Obama’s decision to fit new panels: “It’s great news … ..

The return of solar at the White House follows other symbolic green efforts since Obama took power, including Michelle Obama’s creation of an organic vegetable garden in its grounds last year.

In the senate Republicans and Democrats are currently trying to push through a renewable energy standard that would require utilities to source 3% of their energy from green sources such as wind and solar power by 2012.”

Haase – History, learn from it or become it.
“The last eight presidents have gone on television and promised to move America towards an energy-independent future.”

On July 15 1979, President Jimmy Carter delivered his politically inopportune “malaise speech”, remembered for its downcast assessment of the country’s mood. Less well-known is this startling passage: “I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20% of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.” Suffice it to say, 2000 came and went, and solar still provides less than 1% of US energy.

Comment: 

“President George W. Bush installed a 9 kW ‘building-integrated photovoltaics’ panel on the roof of a grounds maintenance building at the White House for the National Parks Service. Also installed were two solar water heating systems.” Call it a half-gesture. Business as usual has changed slightly in the US since Reagan. Dubya also governed the state (Texas) that has since gone on to lead the US in wind power. If Texas were a separate nation it would rank sixth in the world in wind power installed capacity.

John Stewart on The Daily Show assembled an amusing sequence of video clips showing how every US President since Richard Nixon has delivered an impassioned speech about the need for the US to stop importing oil. While Americans go right on gaswasting. Both Republicans and Democrats understand the US has an energy problem, the oil component of which has undesirable geopolitical consequences…  George W. Bush was, I think, the first President to call Americans oil addicts. Nobody says Bush was wrong about everything.  He also dubbed 140,000 square miles of ocean near the Hawaiian Islands a marine reserve in June 2006. No, really, he did. Not joking. Look.

Also see Happy Presidents Day! Green US president history factoids , The 5 Most Environmentally Friendly Presidents in U.S. History and “The snake oil or solar panels