Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the road for renewables. Like many environmentalists, Hayes had moder-
ate hopes for the incoming Reagan administration— or at least he “wasn't
sure things would be getting a whole lot worse.”
9
Carter had backed off
considerably on environmental policy in the waning years of his term,
nowhere more than in his energy policy. In August of 1979, he had replaced
Schlesinger with Charles Duncan, a Texas millionaire and member of
the Coca-Cola Company's board of directors who, in Hayes's view, “had
essentially no knowledge about renewables— or anything else related to
the environment for that matter.”
10
In a series of short radio addresses dur-
ing the campaign, Reagan had specifically lauded renewables as a way to
support the libertarian desires of “the great American loner”; and up until
Reagan started picking his cabinet, many professional environmentalists
thought they might be able to work with the new president. In any case,
SERI and the DOE had four years of solid growth propelling them forward.
Even without a supportive president, Hayes and his colleagues felt secure
in their posts.
They were sorely mistaken. Upon taking office, the new administration
slashed SERI's budget by nearly 80 percent and issued pink slips with two
weeks' notice to scientists who had recently left tenured university posi-
tions to take their SERI posts.
11
The president began replacing officials at
both SERI and the DOE with loyal political appointees. Most egregious
was James Edwards, a dentist and former South Carolina governor whom
Reagan tapped as secretary of energy to appease Republicans from the
traditionally Democratic South who were upset that the president had no
southerners in his cabinet.
12
In 1986, the president would add insult to
injury by stripping the solar panels from the White House roof. For Hayes
and his SERI colleagues, by as early as January of 1981 the DOE was begin-
ning to look like part of the energy problem rather than a potential part
of the solution.
Sitting on the as yet unpublished Solar Conservation Report, Hayes
and Kelly decided to fight back. What Hayes recalled next reads like some-
thing out of a Raymond Chandler novel:
So I'm back in Washington, D.C., early in 1981 for a meeting with this
acting assistant secretary in the Department of Energy, a guy named
Frank DeGeorge. I always go fishing for intelligence, so I went over to
the department an hour early and I was kind of walking around and a
