Robert Seamans 1918-2008
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 07. 6.08
Robert Seamans is best known for his role in the Apollo Program, but he was also appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1974 to be the first administrator of the Energy Research and Development Administration, which was a precursor of the Department of Energy, to deal with the effects of the Arab oil embargo.
According to the New York Times, on his first day in the job he said “There is no way we can become self-sufficient in 10 years or any time in the future if we keep increasing the use of energy.” Important elements in energy conservation, he said, would be the development of automobiles that get more than 40 percent better gas mileage and the design of buildings that would be less expensive to heat and cool. He told the Times in 1974: “We are never again going to have a cheap-energy situation, and we have got to use every string in our bow if we are going to maintain the lifestyle of this country.”
Too bad nobody listened. Robert Seamans, dead at 89. ::New York Times
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He was wrong about the return of cheap energy, back in the 70's, and that is what prevented us from leaving oil etc. behind for nuclear (at the time, the only feasible other option- renewables research had barely begun). Well, that along with some public opposition as fomented by the environmental activists of the day, some of whom have recently changed their minds on the subject, and the financing challenges caused in part by said public opposition.
He can be wrong again. As much as some of us here on treehugger try to deny it, the amount of clean energy available, even just from covering existing roofs with existing PV, is staggeringly large (on the order of a hundred times as much as the primary energy the world currently uses), and so if we set our minds to it, we can make energy cheap again for a while. Hopefully the current period of expensiveness will drive great efficiency improvements before driving down the price of energy from solar, wind, and so on so much that additional efficiency improvements once again get seen as too expensive.