A little more than 53 years ago, America had its original "Sputnik moment" when the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite. The 23-inch diameter sphere only stayed in orbit for three months but nonetheless freaked out U.S. military and civilian leaders. The Cold War was already a decade old and the thought of Soviet rockets capable of putting a few pounds of metal and electronics into space was not as much on their minds as the potential for the same machines to deliver hydrogen bombs on U.S. cities. A month after the launch, President Dwight Eisenhower responded with a national security speech that included a call for beefing up science and engineering education to catch up with Soviet graduation levels.
It wasn't until nearly four years later, when another Soviet first put Yuri Gargarin into orbit, that a new President responded in a speech brimful of Cold War imagery with a stirring one-paragraph call for landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade. That speech was made a half-century ago. As everyone but the conspiracy theorists know, his announcement not only stunned the audience, it succeeded.
Yesteryear's "Sputnik moment" rallied the nation around fearful competition – the Space Race – which, despite the can-do idealism about putting boots on our nearest neighbor in the solar system, was mostly about preparation for war. The last dusty footprints on the moon are now nearly four decades old. And since then, America hasn't launched anything comparable to JFK's big project.
President Obama came close Tuesday in his State of the Union address. Of necessity, these annual speeches tend to leave out details. Those come later when policy is drafted. Nonetheless, the President did set forth a goal: 80 percent of the nation's energy from clean sources by 2035. Excellent. But the deadline is a generation away. My youngest grandchild will have already voted in two presidential elections by then. We need a much less distant goal.
And we need one that is truly green. One keyed to the fact that it's not just clean energy we're after but a sensible policy directed at climate change. The clean energy standard announced Tuesday falls short on that count.
"Clean coal" is an oxymoron. And while burning natural gas generates less carbon dioxide than coal, the margin of difference is not so great when leakage of methane from loose pipe fittings is taken into account. Moreover, "fracking" to get at the gas is profoundly problematic. Nuclear is an efficient generator of electricity, but nuclear power plants are ultra-expensive, waste storage remains as yet unsolved, and political opposition, though reduced from a decade ago, remains formidable.
This leaves renewables, wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and hydroelectric. That is where our chief focus ought to be.
In addition to the 25-year goal announced by the President, there should be a 10-year goal. Here's an idea for that. Build enough wind turbines to generate 15 percent of our electricity by 2020. And install 20 million solar roofs by the same date. Hundreds of new businesses. Hundreds of thousands of jobs. Call it Reenergize America - 15/20 by 2020.
Is it ambitious? Without a doubt. Was it any less so to send three men 240,000 miles through the vacuum of space, drop a tin-can with two of them onto the blazing, airless surface of the moon, let them stroll around and pick up rocks for a few hours, retrieve and return them home safely, all with 1960s technology and computers having far less capacity than the one I'm typing on?
Sen. Bernie Sanders already showed the way with his bill for 10 million solar roofs. The bill got out of committee in 2010, but that was the end of it. Doubling his proposal to 20 million solar roofs would mean 60,000 megawatts of solar power capacity on residences and small businesses. That's equal to about 5 percent of the total electricity-generating capacity of the United States.
The Obama administration has already done more to promote solar than any President since Jimmy Carter, and it's doubtful Sen. Sanders would feel the President was one-upping him if he were to come out in favor of 20 million solar roofs. The President could become the biggest promoter of wind power, too. In fact, one of his visits in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, Wednesday was to Tower Tech, a company that make towers for wind turbines.
In 2000, the federal Energy Information Administration estimated that the installed capacity of wind turbines in the United States would, at best, reach 20,000 megawatts by 2020. But, as the American Wind Energy Research Association reported in its U.S. Wind Industry Year-End 2010 Market Report released earlier this week, double that - 40,180 megawatts – is already on line. With a fourth of the total, Texas already generates 7.8 percent of its electricity from wind, and Iowa generates nearly 15 percent of its electricity the same way.
To reach 15 percent of total electricity-generating capacity nationwide by 2020 would require ramping up the industry to build in the neighborhood of 210,000 additional megawatts of wind capacity. It would mean building at twice the pace of the best year wind installations have ever been built in the United States – which was 10,000 megawatts in 2009. Too big a reach? Depends on how can-do we're really willing to be. The Chinese installed more than 15,000 megawatts in 2010, a 62 percent increase over the previous year. They're planning to do it again this year.
With just these two interlaced goals, wind- and solar-generated electricity could rise from slightly more than 2 percent now to 20 percent by 2020. And that wouldn't even include solar farms like the one at Nellis Air Force Base, which might total another another 5 percent of electricity. Add in a goal for geothermal and biomass and the figure could approach 30 percent. That would give the nation a fine running start on the 2035 goal.
Reaching a 15/20 goal would, obviously, face obstacles, not the least of which are climate-change deniers, oil barons and a wounded but certainly not moribund coal industry. Their lobbyists and purchased politicians in Congress will argue not only that these goals cannot be met but also that there is no reason to try to do so. Getting a national renewable energy standard in place like the ones that some states, such as California, now have, would be a major step in the right direction. But that seems unlikely for the next two years. Likewise with any kind of national feed-in tariff.
But the President can and should work closely with the states, many of which are demonstrating how innovative policies can take us toward energy and climate-change goals. Some efforts could be undertaken by executive order. Reenergize America - 15/20 by 2020 would offer us one practical and rapid way to begin dealing with our Sputnik moment.