The WarmWar_How to mobilize the same federal machinery that gave
us Wi-Fi, semiconductors, GPS, and the internet—this
time to fight climate change.
START
BYLisa Margonelli
THE FIRST HUGE RENEWABLE-ENERGY
revolution—the one that dotted the US with
hydroelectric dams and ultimately made
power ubiquitous in every American home—
started at a bankruptcy sale. In 1877, Jacob
Schoellkopf went to an auction for a water-
way owned by the Niagara Falls Canal Com-
pany. A succession of entrepreneurs had tried
and failed to harness the ferocious power of
the falling water. That night he told his wife,
“Momma, I bought the ditch.”
Two years later, Thomas Edison made
a light bulb that glowed for 40 continu-
ous hours in his lab. Three years after that,
Schoellkopf installed a generator below the
falls to power 16 electric lamps above it.
Those first lights wowed tourists and gave
people a sense of the powerful waterfall’s
potential. But they didn’t reveal how to gen-
erate power that could travel long distances,
never mind how to make a profit on it. For
the next 14 years investors tried to harness
the falls (one engineer proposed building a
long tunnel beneath them to feed 38 vertical
shafts with turbines that could power facto-
ries above), but everyone failed. It took Nikola
Tesla’s invention of an efficient polyphase
generator to transmit those electrons—and
the sale of his patents to Westinghouse—to
make hydro viable. In 1896 the “Cathedral of
Power” started sending watts to the towns of
Niagara and Buffalo, right next door.
But this 17-year sprint from the lab to Buf-
falo was, in a sense, only a proof of concept,
what we might now call a demonstration
project. It would be another quarter century
before even a third of US homes got elec-
tricity. In 1905 there was a political backlash
against the idea of diverting the public beauty
of the falls for the gain of private compa-
nies. “Shall We Make a Coal-Pile of Niagara?”
asked the Ladies’ Home Journal, sparking
one of the first examples of federal legisla-
tion focused on the environment. The politics
of power began to shift, as people realized
how important it was; in 1912 a federal report
noted that 60 percent of hydropower in the
US was controlled by just two companies.
In 1931, New York governor Franklin Delano
Roosevelt created a state power authoritythat could act as a check on private monop-
olies, announcing that he was giving “back to
the people the waterpower which is theirs.” It
would take FDR’s national power initiatives
to eventually wire all of rural America. Today
Niagara Falls creates enough electricity to
power 3.8 million homes, and hydro plants
provide 16 percent of the world’s electricity.
Niagara’s long timeline is worth remem-
bering as we get serious about reduc-
ing carbon emissions fast enough to keep
average global temperature increases below
2 degrees by 2100. To accomplish this we
will need to push many techno-Niagaras
from the light-bulb-in-the-lab stage to
full deployment around the world—within
just a few decades. These days we tend to
think of such energy revolutions—with all
of their attendant bankruptcies and politi-
cal backlashes—as impossible tasks. Or only
for dreamers. But this is not true. In fact the
United States has led such sweeping techno-
logical revolutions before, and we could do it
again. But we’ll need to dismantle some old
myths and ideologies about who bankrolls
innovation and who benefits.
Americans are, in general, complacent
about innovation, assuming the solution
to our energy problems is one brilliant new
mind away. A few more Elon Musks and we’ll
be saved. But it’s been obvious for nearly a
decade that the private sector isn’t getting
us where we need to go. In 2011 there were
1,256 patents filed for global-warming-
related energy technologies; by 2018, only
285 were filed. And US venture capitalists,
long seen as the drivers of global innovation,
have been eschewing the cleantech sector
since their investments peaked at over $7.
billion in 2011. They invested less than $2.
billion in 2019. Today’s VCs, with their focus
on quick profitability, would see the trans-
formative powers of Niagara Falls as nothing
more than a bankrupt ditch.
Nor can we rely on the traditional high-
carbon energy companies that sell oil,
gas, and electricity to lead us into a clean
energy transition because, in addition to
bankrolling opposition to climate change,
they are heavily vested in an infrastructure
and business model that stands to be over-
turned by new technology.
It’s increasingly clear, then, that the kind
of fast, transformative technology develop-
ment and adoption we need will require the
government to take the lead.