while, but eventually they will be as inexpensive as traditional sources. “Some combination of subsidies and carbon taxes
would thus be needed for a time,” Jacobson said. He recommends a tariff program
to cover the difference between power
generation costs and wholesale electricity
prices to help scale up new technologies.
Auctions in which the right to sell power to
the grid goes to the lowest bidders would
provide incentives for renewable energy
developers to lower costs.
“With sensible policies, nations could
generate 25 percent of their new energy
supply with renewable sources in 10 to 15
years, and almost 100 percent of new sup-
ply in 20 to 30 years,” said Jacobson, who
has been giving talks to scientists and pol-
icy makers as well as guiding research.
“With extremely aggressive policies, all
existing fossil fuel capacity could theoret-
ically be retired and replaced in the same
period, but it’s more likely that full
replacement may take 40 to 50 years.”
Former U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, Democratic
candidate for governor of Washington,
has called the plan’s vision “one that the
United States really needs.”
“Clear leadership is needed,” said
Jacobson, “or else nations will keep trying
technologies promoted by industries
rather than vetted by scientists. It’s going
to take ongoing education.” n
Marguerite Rigoglioso is a Bay Area
freelance writer.
TROVE
‘I seem to be a verb...’
Unstoppable Buckminster Fuller.
BY CYNTHIA HAVEN
A reporter once asked Buckminster Fuller—the American
systems theorist, architect, engineer, author, designer, inventor, environmentalist and futurist—how someone
could learn what he knew. He answered simply:
“Read my books.”
One might start at the Stanford Libraries, which acquired Fuller’s papers in 1999.
COURTESY THE ESTATE OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER; COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL
COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES, STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
It’s one of the most extensive personal
archives anywhere—pretty much every
substantive piece of paper, film photography or audio tape that ever passed across
his desk. About 380 hours of audiovisual
material have been digitized and are available on the web, including his notorious lectures that went on for hours and a video of his
conversations with San Francisco hippies. (Drawing on this collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has mounted
The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area, continuing through July 29.)
Fuller’s signature effort was refining the geodesic dome, a
super-lightweight yet extremely strong structure. But there was
so much more. Under the Dymaxion concept (for “dynamic maximum tension”), he aimed to achieve the greatest possible efficiency and economy in a number of inventions. His aluminum
Dymaxion House features a single pole as structural support, natural heating and cooling, self-generating power, stormproof
design and maintenance-free materials—all weighing in at 3,000
pounds and priced like a Cadillac. The 11-passenger, three-wheeled aerodynamic Dymaxion Car he designed in the 1930s got
30 miles per gallon and could reach 90 mph.
Fuller kept exhaustive, meticulous notes in a mad-scientist sys-
BUCKING TRADITION: In 1946 in
Wichita, Kan., Fuller (left) built a
prototype of the Dymaxion House.
tem he called the Dymaxion Chronofile—about
270 linear feet of its records anchor the archive.
More scrapbook than conventional diary, it begins
with the year of his birth, 1895. The collection documents hundreds of Fuller’s design artifacts, inventions and cartographic works and includes more than 1,000 sketches. Stanford
even has his 26-foot “Fly’s Eye Dome.”
Clearly, he had a lot to say—and he was invariably inventive in
the way he said it. “I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what
I am. I know that I am not a category,” he wrote. “I am not a thing—
a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral
function of the universe.”
Like Bill Gates, “Bucky” Fuller left Harvard sans degree, but he
collected 40 honorary doctorates, as well as the Presidential Medal
of Freedom shortly before his death in 1983. Always on the go, he
famously wore three watches: one for his current time zone, one for
the zone he had departed and one for his next destination. n
Cynthia Haven is the associate director of communications
at Stanford University Libraries.
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