A New Apollo Project for Energy

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

—Proverbs 29:1

No one ever climbed a mountain they believed could not be climbed. No one ever started a business they believed would fail. And no nation ever undertook a major initiative it believed was destined for dust. When Kennedy said America was going to the moon, he did not believe we would fall short. So too, America will not commit itself to tackle the challenge of global warming or break free from the clutches of Middle Eastern oil until we have confidence that we can build a clean-energy future that will be brighter than the world we are living in today.

Why has America not risen to the challenges of climate change and oil dependence to date?

The problem is not inadequate information or insufficient scientific talent. It is not even the relentless obstructionism of vested interests, though we can't underestimate the tenacity and cleverness of the oil and automotive industries and the politicians indebted to them. Rather, the problem is an overabundance of fear. Fear that we cannot solve the problem. Fear that we cannot change the course we are on.

People have a finely developed ability to ignore problems—like the inevitability of our own death—that we believe we can do nothing about.Yet today, we do not have the luxury of ignorance. Our shift to a deep and abiding hope must be grounded in our ability to guide the forces of change for human betterment, informed by the dangers we face but guided by a belief in our own innovative potential.

As we shall see in the pages of this book, the spirit of innovation is alive today. It is alive at the labs of the Nanosolar Company in California, where a new type of solar cell may bring the world cheap electricity from the sun. It is alive in the wheat fields of Idaho, where the first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant in the world could be built. It is alive at the home of Mike and Meg Town in Washington State, which generates more energy than it consumes. In all fifty states of this union, individual Americans and their companies and communities are ready for the liftoff of a second Apollo project. Now we just need to engage the full scope of our national resources to that end.

Kennedy's original Apollo Project invested $18 billion per year (in 2005 dollars). The federal government's R&D budget for energy is now just over $3 billion. Kennedy got us to the moon. The current energy budget will not get us anywhere but to the next high-priced gas station. To put this miserly $3 billion budget into perspective, the federal government spent $6 billion last year building a truck to withstand improvised explosive device (IED) detonations in Iraq. This budget is eclipsed by that of just one company, the Microsoft Corporation, which invests twice that sum, or $7 billion a year, in research. Just one new biological drug can cost a pharmaceutical company $1 billion to develop and bring to market. Even more astounding, according to the Economist magazine, the U.S. power-generating business, arguably the world's largest polluter, spent a smaller percentage of its revenue on research and development than the U.S. pet food industry did. Clearly, our priorities are in the wrong place.

We don't need an incremental increase. We need the equivalent of a new space program. As with the original Apollo Project, much of the capital will flow from the private sector, but it will take federal investment and policy to move that capital toward new technologies that solve these problems.

It is not just money we need. Kennedy did much more than just write a budget. He wrote a new vision statement for the country. He created a national consensus that we were going to do whatever it took to reach that national goal. When young minds of a scientific bent asked "what they could do for their country," their answer was frequently to go into the space program. Our national leadership must now rekindle that sense of national purpose.

Fortunately, we have leaders today who can articulate the vision of a better future. We are about to meet some Americans who have already set out on that path. This book has been written as a map for the journey. It examines in turn each of the technologies in which we must invest to reach our goal, as well as pioneers of the new energy economy who are leading the way. While these inventors and activists can provide the engines of a new energy economy, it must ultimately be the people and our political leaders who set the course. If we choose wisely, when we reach our destination, we will have transformed the face of our nation. In so doing, we will have addressed the three legs of the new Apollo mission: attack global warming, reestablish our national security, and revitalize our manufacturing economy.

But while Kennedy had a decade to perform his feat, we may have far less time.

Surviving the Bomb, Dying from the Heat

To see the consequences of failing to act, we can look to an island nation once the home of America's nuclear testing program and now home to 60,000 very worried people. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and Australia, lie the Marshall Islands. In 1948 they were a charming series of 250 coral atolls that had been home to a gentle and friendly group of Micronesian communities for a thousand years. Those people lived an idyllic existence among the palm trees and abundant coral reefs.

Then we tried to blow it up.

We gave it all we had. We exploded twenty-three nuclear bombs on the Bikini atoll between 1946 and 1958 alone, one of which was the largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated by the United States. We hammered that little island with weapons generating temperatures equal to those on the sun itself. Ours was a scorched-earth policy.

But it did not destroy the will of the Marshall Islanders. They moved away from the Bikini atoll to other islands in the group and resumed their long traditions of living close to the land and sea. Their culture remained intact. The Marshall Islands, as a whole, survived.

But they may now be doomed by the more powerful, more pervasive, more insidious threat of global warming. A nation that survived hydrogen bombs may now succumb to H2O.

With their average height just seven feet above sea level, and the seas rising due to global warming, the Marshall Islands may be a nation that comes to know how the world, or at least their world, ended. As a nation that is...