Carter's installation was actually then the latest in a long line of interested advocates who pushed for American adoption of not a particular device or system, but solar technology as a whole; his panels were better than what came before and worse than what came after, and might have prompted enhanced development, if not for the course history took.

Reagan, on the other hand, was one in a long line of what I like to call "Powerful White Men Whose Irrational Beliefs and/or Reckless Actions Ruined Millions of Lives", alongside the likes of Hoyt Hottel, an MIT chemical engineering professor who co-founded the Combustion Institute and who was somehow allowed to head (and thwart) MIT's solar engineering research efforts. (CEO Jack Welch, welfare reformer Larry Townsend, chemist Thomas Midgley, Jr, and urban planner Robert Moses are also on that list.)

I just think your scope is unnecessarily limited, I suppose.

Not a fan of Reaganomics, and people like Midgley are hard to defend, but I think you have the wrong idea of Hottel. Hottel basically invented solar energy as we know it in the 1930s -- he wasn't some guy trying to subvert it. There's a reason that the highest honor the American Solar Energy Society gives out is called the Hoyt Clarke Hottel Award.

And The Combustion Institute (which was founded in 1954, well after Hottel's solar breakthroughs) isn't the sinister thing you think it is. It's not about cars and their internal combustion, but about combustion science -- the science of fire.

Hottel expressed both explicit bias against solar research and implicit bias against one of his charges, who was actually a much more natural advocate for the technology ( https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/journeys-innova...). He headed MIT's solar research efforts, for sure, but again, I find this strange, since so many of his decisions reflected an undue skepticism for someone in that position. What a coup for his apparent ambitions that his name is on so many of the institutions whose purposes he stunted from the most advantageous perch imaginable: "leading" them.

Ultimately, he was a true advocate for combustion-based heating (solar also being focused on that rather than electricity generation through mid-century), which lead to the national status quo of high levels of airborne pollutants both indoors and in the environment, as well as the ever-present threat of one's domicile or business detonating with little notice. But, you know, worth it since hydrocarbons are cheaper. /s I apologize for the snark, but the way people like this get the benefit of the doubt in retrospect is quite frustrating. They made the world we were born into worse, and they did it on purpose (or negligently), for specious reasons. Fixing their mistakes means acknowledging that they sucked.