The New Yorker:

As President, he told us that we needed to shift to solar power. We should have listened to him then.

By Bill McKibben

On June 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter—sporting a bushy haircut and a wide necktie—invited dignitaries and reporters onto the roof of the White House to watch the installation of thirty-two solar water-heating panels. “A generation from now,” he told them, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”

A generation later, one of those panels showed up in a private museum in the offices of an entrepreneur named Huang Ming, in the city of Dezhou, China. In the spring of 2010, I interviewed Ming, who was building a vast fortune by installing pretty much the same solar water heaters across the country. If you’re flying into a Chinese city, look down and you might see one of the devices on every other roof; even back then there were places where ninety-five per cent of homes sported a panel. Ming had built a truly remarkable headquarters—the so-called Sun-Moon Mansion looked like something out of “The Jetsons,” with two sweeping horseshoes of solar panels that resembled the rings of Saturn cut in half. Ming described Carter as a visionary, and shook his head a little ruefully at the path America hadn’t followed.

That path—well, it’s truly painful to look back on it now, from the vantage point of an Earth where the poles are melting fast, where Africa may be losing fifteen per cent a year of its G.D.P. per capita because of the effects of warming, and where a senior climate adviser for the current President recently said that we now need “a transformation of the global economy on a size and scale that’s never occurred in human history” to “create a livable future for ourselves and our children.”

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