Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
friend of mine— one of the deputy assistant secretaries— stopped me at
his desk.
And he says, “Hey, have you talked to DeGeorge yet?”
And I say, “No, why?”
And he says, “The Solar Conservation Report? Yeah, it's dead as a
doornail, they're never going to let that out.”
So I strolled down the hall, nipped into the nearest elevator, went
back to my hotel, called Henry Kelly and told him to Xerox as many cop-
ies as he possibly could, but get at least fifty or a hundred of these things
FedExed out to environmental organizations and essentially anyone who
might be interested. I had my secretary call this Frank DeGeorge's office
and say I was sorry, I was going to have to cancel that meeting because I'd
come down with the flu, but we'd like to reschedule it for the next time
I'm in town. Didn't seem to be anything terribly important; he hadn't
told me it was.
So I flew back to Colorado, and lo and behold I get a call from Frank
DeGeorge, and we're talking about the report, and he says it's time to
pull the plug on it. I said, “Geez, Frank, there's no way to do that. I've got
a hundred of these things out there for review right now."
13
In the short run, Hayes's ploy worked. He had seen to it that the report
was in the hands of several environmental groups and key politicians, its
intended audience. He was especially sure to leak a copy to Representa-
tive Richard Ottinger of New York, a member of the House Committee
on Energy and Commerce and a strong supporter of federal conservation
and solar programs. Ottinger made the report public domain by reading
it into the congressional record. Brickhouse Publishing then released the
now public document as
A New Prosperity: Building a Sustainable Future
in
April of 1981.
14
Reagan's staff was not amused. When Hayes told me the story in 2009,
he explained the fallout with a wry smile. Hayes, it turns out, was the same
Denis Hayes who had as a college student at Stanford in 1969 led the occu-
pation of the applied electronics building, much to the chagrin of then
governor Ronald Reagan, who had put the National Guard on standby in
Redwood City. According to Hayes, when Reagan's White House counsel
and former gubernatorial campaign manager, Edwin Meese, connected the
name of the wayward SERI director with the brash student body president,
