Solar collector does not have any energy transition

1979 U.S. President Jimmy Carter left mount solar panel on the White House - as a symbolic start to the post fossil fuel era. A Swiss artist duo has made a movie about it.
Franziska Meister
U.S. President Barack Obama is currently not a good figure. Too slow and superficial were his previous efforts in the fight against the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Even worse, is lacking at all in voices that would call for a radical change in energy policy of the country. "A full tank of cheap petrol - which is in accordance with national conviction of the fundamental rights of every American," says Walter Shapiro. He has written over thirty years of speeches for then-President Jimmy Carter, who argued in light of the oil crises in the seventies for a shift to renewable energies. Now Shapiro winking slyly behind his bottle-bottom thick glasses produced in the camera of the Swiss artist couple Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller. A third class was the write request, those symbolic speech, with the Carter inaugurated in June 1979, the solar panels on the roof of the White House.
"The energy crisis is real"
"For the next generations will be the collectors either a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a non-trodden path - or some of the greatest adventure that has made this country ever," Carter said Shapiro left at that time. The program is set for the documentary of Hemauer and Keller. Characteristically, he titled "A Road Not Taken" - a way that was not followed. Carter's successor Ronald Reagan can remove the solar panels in 1986 and disappear. In the storage shed of a small college in Maine and have Hemauer cellar again tracked down the panels. With two of them they appear in the vegetable oil-powered pick-up a trip to Washington, DC, and Atlanta, Georgia, on to the collectors there to feed their destiny as a museum piece. The film thus becomes a quasi-historical act twice: once with this act in the film, and a second time as a visionary document president.
"Actually, I was convinced that the path would be followed in the solar energy," Carter smiles at the camera of the two Swiss. When he was elected in 1976 president, the United States were still under the impression the oil crisis of 1973: The embargo of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had a recession triggered and performed throughout the Western world just how strong it from fossil energy is dependent. Two weeks after taking office in February 1977 said Carter, the population via television for the first time directly to: Dressed in a sweater, he called on to make sacrifices in order to consume less energy. He was convinced that the fossil resources at the end of the 20th Century would run low. "The longer we do nothing, the worse it gets. The energy crisis is real - and it is worldwide. We are at a historic turning point. "Carter pushed for the solar research and enacted laws to reduce fuel consumption, better insulate buildings and electrical appliances to more energy-efficient. All federal agencies had to recycled products to upgrade and promote recycling.
Everything is installed
Hemauer basement and add old television recordings, interviews with contemporaries and an interview with Carter in an energy-political mood of the U.S. in the second half of the seventies. The real protagonist of the film, however, the two solar panels. And Roman Keller himself, who in the course of the "road movie"-like tale directed by two solar panels on their way to the museum itself again and again. Such a small ¨¤ la Michael Moore - but only a bit - you can see him in not just proper loading of the collectors, fooling around with college students or the unsuccessful attempt to a collector at the delivery entrance to the Museum of American History in Washington as a gift leave.
After this initial failure of the mission are Hemauer and Keller, the solar panels of hand at various public places and parks of the capital. You have passers out that the collectors are from the roof of the White House, and then filmed their reactions. Then again, Keller pushes with pink shirt in the picture and held out one of the activists in front of the White House, the microphone, whereupon the latter with a view of the camera so to speak, calling the audience to get involved in solar energy, then use his guitar a song about world peace to sing. In the concrete backyard of the Carter Museum in Atlanta, finally, before which a collector is definitely a museum piece, then the same Roman Keller demonstrates the hard way that the solar water heater is still working order: He is sitting in a tin tub and a shower.
All this makes "A Road Not Taken" at its core is less a historical documentary - it also lacks the critical undertone - as a cinematic installation. "A curiosity", is written at the end on a black background. That seems quite mean and self-referential.
U.S. President Barack Obama needs positive publicity. Urgent. And he recently announced on the roof of the White House want to install solar panels. The project advices Obama's strong commitment to solar energy, said his Energy Secretary Steven Chu. The President wanted a shining example on the way to "clean energy" go ahead.
The WOZ inclined reader rubs his eyes in surprise. But the presidential initiative for over thirty years old and linked to another president named Jimmy Carter. He can be installed as early as 1979 solar panels on the roof of the White House. Their history has documented the Swiss artist duo Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller in the movie "A Road Not Taken" (2010). Your project has a presence on the Internet since 2006.
And then, in early 2009, the trailer for the film generated on the Internet at a stroke 18 000 "hits". Shortly before, Google had contacted the artists, because the company wanted a collectors during the Carter issue of Barack Obama's inauguration in Washington. "We will probably never find out the impact of our project was the decision by the U.S. administration to re-install home solar panels on the roof of the White House," says Hemauer. "We are pleased, however, that Jimmy Carter's vision is resumed. The new facility will however always be a reminder of the missed opportunity. "Whether the United States the path of solar energy will be taking this time really?