SOLAR TODAY Blog

San Diego, May 8 – SOLAR 2008 finished today with a rousing call to build a grassroots renewable energy movement.

Bracken Hendricks, co-author of Apollo’s Fire and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, summarized the sense of the conference: that economically viable technologies exist right now to replace most fossil fuels, dramatically reduce greenhouse gas pollution and by doing so create valuable jobs in a variety of new industries.

“What we face now is a problem of political will,” Hendricks told the closing luncheon. “We need a movement to solve a global challenge.”

Hendricks quoted Martin Luther King, who wrote in reference to the nuclear arms race a generation ago, “We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

The annual conference of the American Solar Energy Society drew about 5000 attendees. A preliminary count indicated a 50% rise in the number of people attending the full six days of workshops, seminars, technical presentations, panels and trainings.