'350' group to return solar panel to White House

By Ethan Andrews | Sep 09, 2010

Unity — A group of Unity College students and staff hit the road Sept. 7 with environmental author and activist Bill McKibben and a solar panel that had been installed on the White House roof during the Carter administration. More than three decades later, the group is returning the panel to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in hopes of convincing President Obama to pick up where Carter left off.

"He [Carter] tried to start the movement back in the '70s," said Amanda Nelson, one of three Unity students taking the road trip.

Her fellow traveler Jean Altomare chimed in.

"We need to start it now," she said. "We're the front lines who are going to protect the world for the next generations."

On Monday, at a pre-departure ceremony at Unity College attended by 50 people, McKibben described the journey as returning a piece of history to where it belongs, though he expressed some skepticism as to whether it would be received that way.

"If it was some other kind of history, if it was a painting stolen from the Lincoln Bedroom, everyone would understand that," he said.

The Carter solar panels — 32 thermal solar hot water heaters installed on the West Wing of the White House in 1979 — were removed in 1983, reportedly during routine roof maintenance, and never reinstalled. Unity College acquired them in 1991, installing 16 on the roof of the school's cafeteria and warehousing the rest. Administrators understood the symbolic value, but until recently hadn't done much with them.

That began to change last year when Swiss filmmakers Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller delivered one of the panels to the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta, documenting the journey in the 2009 film "The Road Not Taken."

In August, Unity College donated a second panel to the people of China. The gift was received by Huang Ming, chairman of Himin Solar Energy Corp., the world's largest manufacturer of solar thermal hot water heaters. The panel is to be installed at the Solar Science and Technology Museum in Dezhou, Shandong Province.

The road trip begun on Monday is part of the global grassroots "350" movement founded by McKibben. The movement takes its name from NASA scientist James Hansen's 1988 assertion that concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere of greater than 350 parts per million are incompatible with the conditions that created life on Earth. According to 350.org, the Web site hub of the "350" movement, that figure is now at around 390.

"350" Organizers have scheduled a "global work party" for Monday, Oct. 10, during which people in communities around the world will install solar panels, insulate homes, ride their bikes to work and take other actions to curb climate change.

The goal of the Unity group's trip to Washington is not to have the Carter solar panel reinstalled on the White House roof, but to encourage the president to install new solar panels, according to Jason Reynolds, who made the trip with Hemauer and Keller in 2009 and is traveling to Washington with McKibben and company.

Like the original installation, Reynolds said, a new installation on the White House would be more symbolic than practical. He likened it to the White House garden planted by First Lady Michele Obama, a symbolic gesture that preceded a large increase in seed sales.

"The symbol is nice. It tells people this is something we all should do," he said. "but he [Obama] needs to be supporting policies that subsidize the solar industry."

The group is planning press stops in Boston and New York and expects to arrive in Washington, D.C., Sept 9. There they hope to meet with President Obama, but as of Monday, it was unknown if that would happen.

McKibben said he had been in communication with the White House, but had yet to receive a firm response, yes or no.

"They keep saying, 'it's complicated,'" McKibben said, with evident exasperation. "Compared to health care, it doesn't seem that complicated."

Amanda Nelson offered a different view.

"If everyone in a van came down to meet the president ..." she said, leaving the conclusion to the imagination.

"Well, we're hoping the message is big enough," she said.