Book Review

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.	2
The book is divided into two main sections, examining energy policy before the onset of energy crises in the 1970s, and policy change during those crises. Drawing on brief case studies of synthetic fuels technology under Truman, nuclear power under Eisenhower, and finally the scattered solar energy research projects of the 1960s in the Defense Department, NASA, and the National Science Foundation, Laird argues that unlike nuclear power, which found a powerful institutional home in the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), solar power never had strong institutional support prior to the energy crises. The agencies researching it had very narrow uses in mind for it, and thus never promoted the broad-based application of the technology. Without institutional support, solar energy advocates were simply not compelling to policymakers.	3
The onset of the energy crises provided opportunities for change. Laird briefly traces the construction of the Department of Energy in 1977 to document that while the opportunity to embed solar in an institutional home existed, the new institution was essentially the old AEC, and solar was given only a tiny fraction of the resources the agency lavished on nuclear power. But more important than the failure to institutionalize, he argues, were the Nixon and Ford administrations' framing of America's energy problem as one of insufficient supply, not excessive demand. This became the public frame, too, and despite President Carter's public dedication of solar water heaters for the White House, this framing of the energy crisis continued through Carter's administration. Hence in his famous "malaise" speech, Carter announced an "Energy Mobilization Board" empowered to suspend environmental regulations in favor of greater energy production, alienating a solar lobby that had thought it finally faced a friendly administration.	4
Laird's book is highly readable and will be useful for advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars in STS or energy policy. Historians may be dissatisfied with the depth of Laird's research, and engineers will be distressed at an implicit assumption that different forms of energy are freely interchangeable; despite solar energy's many merits, it can't make a 747 go. Laird's thesis is nonetheless intriguing and should spark some informative debates.	5
Reviewed by Erik M. Conway. Dr. Conway is a visiting historian at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and currently is writing a history of supersonic transport research.

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