I would love to see a fundamental re-thinking of whether we truly want to be the world's largest debtor nation, feeding an insatiable desire for mall-crawling with cheaply made crap from all over the world.
Denis HayesOur 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.
Denis HayesEnvironmentally, business in America in 1970 was very similar to business in China today. Even if a CEO wanted to be a responsible corporate citizen, he (and they were all "he's" then) simply couldn't invest a billion dollars in pollution controls to produce a product that was indistinguishable from those of his competitors. His products would be priced out of the market. Passing laws that created a clean, level playing field for whole industries had to be a core focus of the 1970s.
Denis HayesWe shouldn't fuel the future with the polluting methods of the past, ... We have the technology to power our future in ways that don't threaten our health or poison our planet. Let's choose to use it.
Denis HayesAmerica has the technology and resources to meet all its energy needs while safeguarding the earth's climate. The urgent question now is, 'Do we have the will?' At least one city does, and I'm proud to live in it.
Denis HayesWith time environmental issues got much more complicated. It is pretty easy, if you know what you are doing, to stop a company from pouring poison into a lake where kids swim. It is much harder to address all the myriad greenhouse gases emitted by different sources - from petrochemical refineries to hundreds of millions of peasants cutting down trees for their incredibly inefficient cook stoves.
Denis Hayes