Obama Says No to Solar Panels on White House Roof

(Sept. 14) -- The Obama administration has nixed the idea of reinstalling solar panels on the White House roof.

Some 32 solar panels were first installed on the executive mansion's roof by then President Jimmy Carter as part of his efforts to tout clean, renewable energy during the 1970s, when the U.S. faced severe shortages and price spikes after an oil embargo by Arab countries. Carter held a rooftop news conference in 1979 to show off the panels and discourage reliance on foreign oil.

The panels were yanked off after Ronald Reagan took office a year later, but they didn't disappear. Instead, some of them have been stored for the past 30 years by environmentalists at Unity College in Maine, where they were used to heat water in the school's cafeteria. Last week, a group of students loaded one of the vintage 6-by-3-foot panels into a biodiesel van headed for Washington.

The group was led by Bill McKibben, founder of the environmental group 350.org, who described the mission on his blog: "If the president can't climb up on the roof and hammer in some solar panels, clearly we need to push him up."

The technology used in the Carter-era solar panels is now outdated, but a California company called Sungevity offered to outfit the White House with new panels for free. More than 8,000 people have signed on to a Facebook group in support. McKibben appeared on David Letterman's "Late Show" last week to plug the effort as well.

Denied a meeting with Obama himself, McKibben landed an audience with three midlevel White House officials last Sept. 10, "who told him, politely, no dice," according to The New York Times.

"They refused to take the Carter-era panels that we brought with us and said they would continue their deliberative process to figure out what is appropriate for the White House someday. I told them it would be nice to deliberate as fast as possible, since that is the rate at which the planet's climate is deteriorating," McKibben told the newspaper.

The White House issued a statement with its own version of events, saying officials met with McKibben "to discuss President Obama's unprecedented commitment to renewable energy, including more than $80 billion in the generation of renewable-energy sources."

The statement didn't explain why the White House turned down the idea of reinstalling solar panels, but security issues are likely the problem, the Times' environmental blogger, Andrew Revkin speculated. Security on the White House roof is stricter now, since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, than it was during Carter's time in office.

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The Guardian said the Obama administration may be "twitchy perhaps about inviting any comparison to one-term Democratic president Carter in the run-up to the very difficult midterm elections in November."

Undeterred, McKibben blogged that the Carter-era panels will stay in D.C. as "a symbol of a road not taken." His group is organizing thousands of similar renewable-energy events as part of a "10/10 Global Work Party" planned for Oct. 10.

"There are still a lot of rooftops -- in Washington and around the world -- that could use some solar," he wrote.