#63 The History of Green Energy w/ Alexis Madrigal
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 24 July 2017
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When most Americans think of sustainable technology, they think of Jimmy Carter's solar panels or the windmills that are beginning to pop up across the country. But so-called "sustainable" or "green" energy has a history that can be traced back to the 19th century. In this episode of The Road to Now, Alexis Madrigal explains sustainable energy's deep roots in American history, and discusses the viability of green energy as an alternative to coal, oil, and solar energy production in the 21st century.
Alexis Madrigal is technology correspondent at The Atlantic and Editor-at-Large at Fusion. His 2009 book, Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology was published by Da Capo Press in 2011.
For more on this episode and all others, visit our website: www.theroadtonow.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Our friend Dolphus Ramser was born and raised in Concord, North Carolina, a town so rich |
| 0:07.4 | with history that it provided the inspiration for its independent record label and management |
| 0:12.6 | company. |
| 0:13.7 | So great was the city's influence on Ramser that he continues to live and work in Concord |
| 0:19.0 | today with a full-time staff located in both North Carolina |
| 0:22.7 | and California. He and his team always put their clients music first, work as hard as they can, |
| 0:28.7 | and have fun along the way. Visit ramsar.com to learn more. |
| 0:36.9 | Welcome to the road to now where we look to the past and everywhere in between. |
| 0:40.8 | To understand the present, I'm Bob Crawford, and joining me as always is Dr. Ben Sawyer. |
| 0:45.8 | It's great to be here with you guys, and it's great to be continuing this series on energy. |
| 0:49.9 | Today, the topic is renewable energy. Ben, who is our guest? |
| 0:53.4 | Our guest is Alexis Madrigal, a journalist. He's worked for The Atlantic. He's worked for Wired. |
| 0:58.4 | He wrote an amazing book, Powering the Dream, the History and Promise of Green Technology. |
| 1:03.0 | Couldn't have found a better guest, I think, both in terms of knowledge and in terms of just rolling with a conversation. |
| 1:08.2 | Like, we always try on this podcast to make a conversation less of an interview. |
| 1:12.9 | And Alexis was on fire the whole time. |
| 1:15.1 | And this is really the total package in terms of this interview. |
| 1:18.2 | I think what's interesting in what we learned in this episode was that we all kind of think |
| 1:23.7 | that renewables are this silver bullet to America's energy problems, really the |
| 1:29.6 | world's, the planet's energy problems. But they come with their own baggage as well. And |
| 1:35.8 | there are unintended consequences that come along with renewable energy. That's right. And any |
| 1:41.7 | type of energy that we have, one of the important variables, can you use it everywhere? |
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