The democratisation of solar energy might change everything

In my primary school days in the 1970s, solar energy was just a thing in books: arrays powering interplanetary outposts and Telecom repeater towers in the Australian outback. My mother, Shirley, bought me the documentary comic Ecology for Beginners and I learned that solar panels were ‘soft’ or ‘alternative’ technology.¹ The lesson: that unlike big, profitable corporate systems such as coal and nuclear, which were environmentally damaging, solar was a small, gentle and democratic energy source.² It might be expensive and less powerful, but it was necessary to switch to alternative energy in order to conserve nature.

After reading Ecology for Beginners I graduated to my father’s library. Moss was Australia’s first minister for the environment and conservation, during the first Whitlam government of 1972–74, so I had plenty to read. I lapped up the photographs of the Tasmanian wilderness by Olegas Truchanas. I dug into texts by E.F. Schumacher, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, Ivan Illich and the Club of Rome. I wore the badges and aspired to live by the slogans of the ecological counterculture: Solar not nuclear; Live simply so others may simply live; Save the whales.