| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values. By Frank N. Laird. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xvii + 248 pp. $55.00.

Frank N. Laird writes that his purpose is to use the post-war historical development of U.S. energy policy to explicate the interaction of ideas, interests, and institutions in the defeat of the solar energy lobby during the late 1970s. Drawing on the papers of each U.S. president from Truman to Carter, published reports, congressional hearings, and advocacy journals, Laird argues that solar energy advocates have been unable to significantly alter the frame through which policymakers in the executive office of the president perceive energy issues. 1

Laird begins with a discussion of how ideas informed policy debates. Actors in the energy technology debates, he argues, associated their preferred technologies with a specific, desirable, way of life. Throughout the book, he returns to this theme to show how each successive administration's policy rhetoric defined a way of life, and thus an intellectual frame, that equated growth in energy consumption with progress, that emphasized the superiority of impersonal market forces over regulation, that based national security on adequate energy supplies—but not necessarily domestic supplies—and that promoted "new technology" as the solution to future energy problems. It is this supply-side, pro-consumption, anti-regulatory bias that solar energy advocates could not overcome. . . .

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