'Bell-Bottoms and Gas Masks' ... A Look at the First Earth Day

Posted by Isaac Fitzgerald, AlterNet at 9:47 AM on April 22, 2009.

Happy earth day everyone. The Rumpus has a great interview with Denis Hayes, who "coordinated the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, when 20 million people took to the streets and kicked off the environmental movement." Hayes discusses the popularity of the environmentalism during the 70s, the dark times of the Reagan administration, and his hopes for the future:

Rumpus: Let’s say that President Obama made you climate & energy czar. What five big actions would you take?

Hayes: Big actions, in our system of checks and balances, require approval by Congress and have to pass constitutional muster by the Supreme Court, and some powers are reserved to the states. So this overused “czar” word is a little misleading. But the things America ought to do should include the following:

1. An aggressive building performance standard for all new buildings, and a set of performance requirements to be met by all buildings before they can be sold (when upgrades can be included in the new mortgage). These should encompass heating and cooling, lighting, and plug loads. Coupled with new efficiency standards for appliances, lights, and furnaces, this should reduce the energy consumption of new buildings by 50 percent, more or less immediately, and go on from there.

2. If the government is going to put money into the automobile sector, it should break up GM and Chrysler as a condition of financial aid, and it should be even-handed in its treatment of start-up firms like Tesla, Miles, Fisker, and others. It would be terrible to kill the entrepreneurs who have taken great risks to bring new automotive technologies to market by pumping tax dollars into the behemoths that have done everything wrong for the last 40 years. That, coupled with a $4 per gallon tax on gasoline, phased in over four years, and bonuses for junking old inefficient cars would transform personal transportation swiftly.

3. Build high-speed, electrified trains over the most-traveled corridors. It’sreally hard to power carbon-free airplanes, but electrified trains are much easier. We’ll be a half century behind the Japanese, but better late than never.

4. Establish a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard for all electricity, causing 50 percent of all generation to come from renewables by 2020 (with a tranche requiring half of that to come from solar), and 100 percent by 2030. Couple that with feed-in tariffs to provide financing and cost-controls to eliminate profiteering. The goal is to turn solar electric technologies into a commodity business like computer chips, and make them ubiquitous in the built environment. I’d couple this with a huge commitment to fundamental research in nanostructure to goose the next generation of more efficient, cheaper, dematerialized cells. And if I’m truly czar, I’d emphasize silicon technologies, as that approach is the one least likely to encounter material constraints in supplying an explosive global demand.

5. A firm cap on carbon emissions from fossil fuels. No coal, oil, or gas could enter the economy until the buyer had a permit. All permits would be auctioned by the federal government, and the number of permits auctioned would be decreased by three percent per year. Permits could be traded, but they could not be created out of whole cloth by companies that plant forests or dump iron filings at sea. And, at least for the first several years, it would be illegal to manufacture derivatives to trade on futures markets for future permits.

You can read the whole interview here. Also, don't miss National Geographic's fantastic photo essay: "The First Earth Day--Bell-Bottoms and Gas Masks" (h/t The Rumpus).

Tagged as: environmentalism, earth day, reagan, environmental movement, denis hayes, national geographic, bell-bottoms, gas masks