WORLDFIRE - Chapter 10, Part I
Imagine a Green Industrial Revolution
Rocket trike being towed by "Seven"
"A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together becomes reality." John Lennon (1940-1980)
Wishing I were still on the Katy Trail, I instead found myself in morning rush hour traffic running behind schedule, but I made it to the Fox2 News studio not terribly late. Rolling up to the back lot, I received an unexpected blast from the past. There was “Black Beauty,” the car driven by “Kato” (played by martial arts legend Bruce Lee) in the 1960s television series, The Green Hornet. Not about to miss a chance to sit in the famous car used by the vigilante crime fighters I watched on TV growing up, the kid in me wasted no time getting behind the wheel. Jet black, the imposing-looking car had machine guns mounted on the hood and rocket launchers and a flamethrower embedded in the grill.
When the host of The Morning Show, Tim Ezell, walked out, I thought playtime was over, but it was just getting started. A delightful character, Ezell seemed as excited about the rocket trike as I was about Black Beauty, so I did something I rarely let anyone do. I let him hop in and take it for a spin, which he proceeded to do, with the cameras rolling. The story on the ride that ran with him reporting from inside the trike was not only highly entertaining; it reached a lot of viewers with the green energy moon shot message.
One might think this would be the highlight of my day, but things were about to get even better. Exactly one month to the day after departing Boulder, my website was finally live. Thanks to the determined persistence of my friend Mike Stone back at mission control, the glitches had finally been worked out. A wave of relief washed over me. I no longer felt like “Major Tom,” sitting in my “tin can,” with the circuit dead. I pedaled back to the hotel and excitedly spent the rest of that day, and all of the next, directing friends and colleagues to the website and uploading the latest photos and videos from the road. Making these two days even sweeter was a friend who surprised me by springing for a mid-ride national press release distribution. Inspired by the YouTube videos I was posting, she convinced me to pitch them in the release as “reminiscent of Studs Terkel’s intimate conversations with Americans.”
Finally back on the road and newly energized, I wound my way through the backstreets of St. Louis to the heart of downtown using a bike-friendly route provided to me by a local cyclist. After striking out at the St. Louis Dispatch, where I was told all the beat reporters were out on assignment, I pedaled to the local NBC studio hoping for better luck there. But for some determined persistence, I would have struck out there, too. After first being ordered by a security guard to remove the trike from the terrace, the guard inside all but threw me out of the lobby when I asked if he could patch me through to the news desk upstairs, chastising me that the newsroom would never talk to someone coming in off the street. So I stepped outside and dialed up the news desk myself, before spending the better part of an hour out on the sidewalk being filmed by a friendly NBC reporter for a story they would run on their local network. I don’t waste time listening to people who try to tell me what I can’t do.
From there I proceeded to the famous Gateway Arch, located a few blocks away. Rolling up to it, I was thrilled to have reached what I imagined to be the halfway point of the journey. I was now 1,100 miles from home. There I was warmly welcomed by two young women, Angelina Giannas and Rachel Drochter, each with a cold beer in hand waiting for the rest of a wedding party. When I asked if I could interview them for my YouTube channel, they were both good sports. Speaking about the ten-year renewables goal, Rachel said: “I think it’s possible. It’s just going to be a group effort, for sure.” Angelina echoed her friend: “Green is the way to go.” Raising her fist, she said, “Go green.”
If my mind weren’t so much on my mission, I would have joined them for a beer. Instead, I positioned the trike under the “gateway to the west” for my ceremonial passage to the east. But when I tried to pedal forward, the trike wouldn’t budge. For some reason, the chain had picked that particular moment to disengage from the chain ring. More amused than frustrated, I just stuck my feet through the holes in the floor of the trike and propelled myself under the arch Fred Flintstone-style.
After reengaging the chain, I rolled over to the nearby Riverfront Bike Path, a concrete ribbon running north along the Mississippi River, where I encountered a ceramic wall mural so unique I just had to capture it on film. I backed off the concrete into the grass for a better camera angle, but when I tried to pedal back up onto the raised lip of the path, the chain complained before giving way with a sickening pop. Beside myself, I got out to survey the damage, when a nearby camper casually walked up to ask if I needed help. Tom Reese (yes, another Tom), who had just ridden his moped from Spokane, Washington with his dog trailing him on a flatbed, was better prepared than me. A former bike mechanic, he just happened to have special tools on his trailer for repairing broken chains. He even had spare chain links. 30 minutes later, Tom presented me with a repaired trike, looking every bit the bike mechanic as I shook his oil-stained hand. I could hardly thank him enough for his selfless act. Tom then gave me a personal tour of the Mother Nature mural, which began as underwater sea creatures, then evolved into land creatures, with the figures finally taking flight as birds and butterflies. An observant soul, he pointed out that the colorful clay birds had been made by children, with inscribed hearts in the middle. Clearly, a lot of love had gone into making that beautiful mural.
Before we parted ways, Tom told me there was a homeless tent city a little way up the path, so I pulled over when I spotted it. Two guys who walked up to check out my rig told me I was in “Hopeville.” What a great name for a homeless encampment. In the fading light, one of Hopeville’s residents, a young man named DJ, looked into my camera and made a powerful appeal for jobs in America to help people get back on their feet: “My name is DJ and I’m homeless and I’m looking for a job. Basically, we all need jobs here in America. And there’s very rarely no jobs here in St. Louis. So I’m just saying, this thing what this guy got going on, I think is excellent, man… it’ll work, it’ll work for all of us.” Listening to DJ grieved me. Where is the justice in having unemployed Americans, many of them veterans, homeless and living in tent cities while fossil fuel barons block a green industrial revolution and the millions of good-paying jobs that energy transition will create? Where is the regard for human need in the face of such rapacious greed? I told DJ I would take his message to Congress and the White House.
The United States is the richest country in the history of the world. If we have the money to bail out Wall Street, slash corporate tax rates, subsidize Big Oil, and wage war, we have the money to install solar panels on every sun-splashed rooftop in America. Imagine low-income families being provided with universal solar access, with installations for families in higher income brackets subsidized on a sliding scale. Instead of progressive taxation, call it progressive solarization. Picture the hollowed-out Rust Belt turned Green Belt buzzing with workers like DJ producing all those solar panels, and wind turbines, and electric cars, and batteries. Then think about all the lucrative livelihoods that economic activity will create.
Still pondering DJ’s words, I pedaled a few more miles up the bike path as the darkness descended. Stashing the trike in a grove of trees, I dispensed with the tent and tossed my sleeping bag onto the ground 26 miles, but a world away, from the luxurious hotel room where I had started the day. Sleeping under the stars on the banks of the lazily flowing Mississippi River had me feeling a little bit like Tom Sawyer. A light drizzle awakened me in the wee hours of the morning, and I started to get up to pack, but thankfully the rain stopped, granting me a little more riverside rest.
Ten miles up the path was the “Chain of Rocks” Bridge to Illinois. Built at the beginning of America’s love affair with cars, the beautiful old bridge has moved beyond cars. Linked to more than 300 miles of trails on both sides of the river, the car-free steel bridge is part of the Route 66 Bikeway. On it, I passed an array of colorful displays like an old gas pump, an ancient red fire truck, and an original Route 66 highway sign. For a sense of just how wide the Mississippi River is, it took me about five minutes to pedal across.
Waiting for me at the bridge was St. Louis climate activists Tom (another Tom) and Carol Braford, whom I had earlier befriended at an international climate conference in Brazil calling for 80% carbon cuts globally by 2020. We rendezvoused at a restaurant on the Illinois side of the bridge, where I was treated to breakfast and briefed on an urban eco-village they were creating as a model for St. Louis and the nation described as “earthquake-hardened, off-the-grid, self-sufficient in food, water, and renewable power production.” Tom explained why they were doing it: “If we can just create tipping points, countervailing tipping points, consciously to the ones that we’ve unconsciously created that are leading to our own extinction, then we can actually turn this around.” Inviting others to join the cause, he said: “Lester Brown has said that we can be the generation that ends poverty and hunger and stabilizes population and the climate. The choice is ours. It’ll be made by our generation, those of us that are in our productive years of our life right now, but it’ll affect life on earth for all generations to come, and so we’re choosing life.”
Buoyed by Tom’s energy and vision, I was eager to get to Springfield, despite it requiring a long detour north, because I planned to film a special video there. I soon found myself on another car-free bike path another St. Louis cyclist had turned me onto, where yet another cyclist on a recumbent bike rode with me for a spell. He was even kind enough to circle back and check on me as the sun started to drop to tell me about a campground several miles up the way near Litchfield. The bike tribe takes care of its own.
Not far from the campground, I spotted a residential wind turbine and solar tracker in someone’s front yard and had to stop and inquire. When I knocked on the door, the owner’s daughter, Kelly Schmidt, answered. She volunteered to give me a tour of their green energy system. I was surprised to learn it was a homemade system, a “family and friend project,” that had been built with the help of a state grant. Kelly told me her family and friends were all electricians who grew up on farms. She said: “I think it’s really cool because everybody in my town is like oh, you’re the house with the wind turbine. It’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’” When I told her I could tell they were proud of what they had built, she said, “Yeah, especially my dad. This is something that he’s always wanted, and so it’s something that he can say, ‘I built this.’” I was inspired how the Schmidts took the initiative to harness the free, inexhaustible energy of the wind and the sun.
I finally rolled into the campground just before dark, with 69 more miles behind me. As I started setting up camp, a friendly-looking guy walked up and introduced himself as Wayne Bennett. Wayne was curious about the solar panels on my trike, so I explained to him how the flexible panel, draped over my saddlebags, powered my blinker system and how the smaller array charged my phone. He invited me back to his RV, where I met his wife and where he shared his "crazy hair" idea of powering his travel trailer with a solar tracker and marketing the technology to other RV retirement parks in Texas. I told him it sounded like a ripe business opportunity for an enterprising entrepreneur. When I asked what he thought about the green energy moon shot goal, Wayne quietly looked down for a second, then looked me in the eye and said: “I would like to see the oil fields bubble over in Saudi Arabia and not be able to sell a drop. I would love to see the U.S. self-sufficient.” Wayne is hardly alone in his desire to see America energy independent.
The Sun, not oil, is the world’s most abundant energy resource. We are blessed with a surplus of sunlight. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) reports that solar technologies have the technical potential to generate more than 100 times the electricity America currently consumes. A 2021 U.S. Department of Energy study further concluded that solar could power 40 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2035 without raising the price of electricity. According to NREL: “More energy from the sun falls on the earth in one hour than is used by everyone in the world in one year.” Yes, those golden rays must be captured, but with sufficient storage and distribution, tapping even a small fraction of that energy could potentially power the entire U.S. electricity grid. In his eye-opening book Clean Disruption, Stanford University lecturer Tony Seba calculates how much land is needed to power an electric U.S. car fleet for a year with solar, versus how much oil and gas drilling land is needed to power a combustion engine car fleet. The answer is 874 square miles for solar and 400,000 square miles for fossil fuels, a ratio of roughly 450:1.
Of course, the best thing about solar energy is the fuel is free. I had sighted more than a few solar systems providing electricity for homes, schools, churches, and businesses between here and Boulder, but what is currently installed in the U.S. is only a drop in the bucket. America has not even begun to tap the immense power of the sun. The last time I looked, the top four solar states in the U.S. (ranked in order of capacity developed) were: California, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina.
As described by NREL, the three “most commonly used solar technologies for homes and businesses are solar water heating, passive solar design for space heating and cooling, and solar photovoltaics for electricity.” There is also Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), best suited for desert environments. CSP uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays to heat a fluid, usually molten salt, which produces steam to power a turbine. Heat stored in the molten salt tank makes CSP a dispatchable source of energy available for use after the sun goes down. Of course, it’s not practical, or desirable, to build CSP projects everywhere, so how do we solve the dilemma of providing electricity 24/7 for the more common solar technologies? Battery storage. In 2012, the New Zealand territory of Tokelau used batteries for storage to become the world’s first island nation to generate 100 percent of its electricity from solar power. So don’t listen to the cynics who say that solar power isn’t dispatchable.
Solar technology is also affordable. Over the past 40 years, the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules has dropped by roughly 99%. The three main drivers behind this economic miracle are government and private R&D, market stimulation policies, and economies of scale. In just the past ten years alone, the cost of installing solar has dropped by more than 40% in the U.S., but installation costs are still higher than they need to be. More federal oversight of complex and conflicting regulations that affect soft costs like permitting, inspection, and interconnection fees would make solar even more affordable. As things currently stand, the average payback time for a typical rooftop PV system is ten years or less, after which the system operates for free.
This 2020 finding from the International Energy Agency should have made headlines around the world: “For projects with low-cost financing that tap high-quality resources, solar PV is now the cheapest source of electricity in history.” Five years before that, the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center commissioned a study called “Going Solar in America” that also should have been front-page news. They found that “in 46 of America’s 50 largest cities, a fully-financed, typically-sized solar PV system is a better investment than the stock market, and in 42 of these cities, the same system already costs less than energy from a residential customer’s local utility.” Solar power just keeps getting cheaper and the fuel cost is zero. Think about it. Just as with wind power, the fuel is free forever. A less talked about benefit of having solar panels on your rooftop is how they keep your home cooler in the summertime by absorbing heat that would otherwise beat down on your roof.
Another option that democratizes energy production is community-scale solar gardens. Yet another is agrivoltaics (farming cash crops under solar panels). But it is not just on rooftops and in solar gardens where we need to be installing a lot of PV and installing it fast. Utility scale PV solar farms are now sweeping the world, thanks to their low cost. The cost of utility-scale solar PV dropped by more than 80% globally between 2010 and 2021. The world’s largest arrays currently range from hundreds of megawatts to two gigawatts in size. China is currently constructing a solar and wind project 100 gigawatts in size. This is the kind of scale we need.
Let’s talk about jobs. The U.S. Department of Energy reports that in 2021 the solar industry created almost twice as many jobs in the electric power generation sector as the coal, oil, and natural gas [methane] industries combined. As it is, solar photovoltaic installer is one of the fastest growing occupations in the U.S., with a median salary of more than $48,000 a year. Now think about how many jobs will be created once we get serious about solar. We all know the Sun makes things grow. Now we know this also includes lots of lucrative careers.
Other emerging solar technologies showing great promise include transparent solar cells directly applied to windows to solar nanotechnology to solar roads. Entrepreneurs in China are even looking into building solar roads that recharge electric cars wirelessly, which would eliminate the battery range issue. When two daring Swiss pilots made history in 2016 by flying Solar Impulse–a 100% solar-powered plane–around the world using zero fossil fuels, you know the sky’s the limit for solar.
Just as with any human technology, there are downsides to solar. For one, the sun doesn’t always shine, but like with wind power, battery storage can help solve the variability issue. Another not uncommon challenge to siting large-scale solar projects involves impacts to sensitive wildlife species and habitats, which can be minimized through careful siting and strict regulatory oversight. Other development impacts can be minimized by transparently consulting with affected communities and by taking proactive conservation measures (e.g. planting native vegetation under solar arrays to help the planet’s struggling pollinators). The 30-40-year lifespan of a typical PV panel also begs the question of what to do with old panels that need replacement or upgrading. So that we don’t find ourselves someday scrambling to figure out how to safely recycle those panels (most of which contain toxic materials like cadmium), closed loop reuse and recycling must be built into the solar system now. The simplest solution would be to make the producers of solar modules responsible for recycling them, like the European Union requires. The solar industry also needs to make every effort to minimize the impact of mining for materials.
It wasn’t a solar array, however, that caught my attention navigating a frontage road parallel to Interstate 55 en route to Springfield. It was a lone wind turbine perched atop a hill. Curious, I took a detour down a gravel road for a closer look. Called the GobNob Wind Turbine, it sits directly atop the former Crown coal mine, and on windy days generates enough green electricity to power about 300 homes. The hill was actually an 80-foot-high pile of rocks from the abandoned mine, with the extra height making it easier for the 230-foot-tall turbine to capture the strongest winds. What a poetic metaphor for making the transition from dirty to clean energy.
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.