While still in his 20s, Harvard student and Stanford graduate Denis Hayes was selected by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson to serve as the national coordinator of the first Earth Day, held April 22, 1970. Modeled after anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, this initial event tapped into grassroots sentiment and mobilized 20 million peaceful demonstrators across the country, all advocating environmental reform. In its wake, the demonstrations helped sway politicians to pass legislation like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.

Earth Day is now observed in 174 countries, making it the most widely observed secular holiday in the world, and Hayes continues to serve as chairperson for the Earth Day Network.

Among the many important positions he’s filled, perhaps one of the most interesting was director of the Solar Energy Research Institute during the Carter administration, where he assembled a team of experts from some of the nation’s leading colleges and universities—only to have funding drastically cut in the first six months of the Reagan administration.

Speaking from his office as president of the Seattle-based Bullitt Foundation, a $100 million foundation that promotes environmental sustainability and works to protect the natural environment in the Pacific Northwest, Hayes describes the atmosphere in those early months of 1981.

“They cut our budget by $100 million dollars,” he says. “Terminated, in one afternoon, more than half of the staff. Fired all of our contractors. And did all of this stuff in such a heavy-handed way that you’d almost think that they were trying to drive people out of the field—not merely terminate them.

“I had guys that I had persuaded to give up tenure at universities to come to Colorado for this ‘Manhattan Project’ for the good guys—who were given two weeks’ notice and no severance pay.”

You can still hear the dismay in his voice as he continues: “Of course, beyond those that they fired, the most talented people in the lab are always those with three or four job offers sitting on their desks. So in addition, a great many of those just saw that the future looked fairly bleak there and voluntarily left.”

And so, in one afternoon, the US implemented a policy change that would take it from being the undisputed global leader in renewable energy research to being an also-ran.

“At the time [Carter] left office, the United States was spending more money, employing more PhDs, generating more patents and deploying more renewable energy technology than the rest of the world put together,” Hayes remembers. “And then we just walked off the cliff.”

Japan, Germany, Denmark and Spain were left to take up the slack. Hayes sadly notes that none of the 10 largest solar manufacturers in the world in 2006 were American.

For a man who has become an icon of the environmental movement and has intimately experienced the political winds of change, Hayes seems remarkably unbowed, optimistic and, frankly, excited. Not only are environmental issues spreading rapidly to the forefront of popular consciousness, but he intimates that scientific and economic forces are at work that will fundamentally enhance our ability to harvest and use energy produced from a variety of renewable sources, notably the sun.

“If you look at the semiconductor industry for, say, computer chips, it follows a learning curve that is transmogrified into Moore’s Law [named for Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who observed in 1965 that the number of transistors being placed on an integrated circuit seemed to double every two years]. Moore’s law says that as the volume goes up, power increases and the cost per unit of almost anything you want to measure declines. The same sort of thing happens with other semiconductors, including solar cells. We have had a very long period with solar cells where the volume has slowly risen. It grew more rapidly for computer chips because that was underwritten initially by the Department of Defense and then somewhat by NASA—who were willing to pay very high prices for these things because it was so uniquely valuable to get this kind of control technology on a very small, very light device.”

Hayes explains that when the price of such technology drops to a certain point, then the market takes over and demand begins—first for niche applications and then for mainstream applications. Then the price becomes incredibly low and the market explodes. And even though the US has not been at the vanguard of this technology over the last 30 years due to lack of funding, the slow, relentless growth in Japan and Germany, for example, is reaching a critical point where it begins to accelerate, and should start moving faster and faster every year. “I’m quite confident that we’re going to follow that same kind of trajectory,” Hayes says. “So whereas solar cells used to be $50 a watt, they’re now $4 a watt, and within the next three or four years will be at $1 a watt. At that point it will be by far the cheapest source of electricity for the vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants.”

If Hayes is correct, then policy-makers in this country have an important choice to make. Will Americans be selling solar technology to the rest of the world, or will they be buying it from another country? On the present course, odds seem to favor the latter.

When asked, Hayes is generous in his praise for the film An Inconvenient Truth. “It’s a real tribute to Al Gore that he has managed to do this,” Hayes says “Historically when these kinds of things have overcome huge, vocal, well-funded opposition, it’s been someone outside the political framework. People tend to be suspicious of politicians—it’s been the Rachel Carsons, the Carl Sagans. The fact that Gore has managed to put together a movie based on a PowerPoint presentation”—he laughs—“and to do it in a fashion that has sufficiently high production values and sufficiently strong support from the scientific community…I’d say without any qualifications it’s been a huge contributor to greater public understanding. Not only to the magnitude of the issue but of the urgency to begin to act.”

How does Hayes respond to those who perceive global warming as a kind of myth? “For a long time I responded because there were elements of responsible disagreement within the mainstream climatological community—not whether it’s a myth but exactly what the implications were, how rapidly it would be happening,” he says. “How much of this was carbon dioxide vs. other greenhouse gasses. But the closure over the last five years on these issues has been sufficiently strong that I’m guessing…and I hate to say this…but almost any intelligent, educated person who now has not reconciled himself to the fact that climate change is happening, and it’s happening pretty swiftly, and it’s being caused by human actions, probably isn’t going to be convinced by evidence. He’s gotta be operating off of an ideological base or something else that simply forces him, or her, into a state of psychological denial.”

Not so incidentally, on April 2, the US Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration’s claims that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses were not pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act and therefore couldn’t be regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. This ruling opens the door for the introduction of new national standards for cleaner cars and power plants, enforceable by the EPA.

You get the sense that Hayes is the type of person who’s too busy looking at the future to become disillusioned by setbacks of the past. “Regardless of what has happened over the last quarter century, slowly these technologies have now developed to the point that they’re starting to take off fairly aggressively,” he says. “We’re seeing that already with wind. We’re seeing it with biofuels. We will increasingly be seeing cellulosic ethanol. And we are already seeing in certain parts of the world—and will soon see in the US—the explosive growth of solar energy. The talk is basically optimistic and very upbeat.”

Denis Hayes will be in town for two speaking engagements on April 10. The first, “Greening Buffalo: Revitalizing Our Economy While Addressing Climate Change,” will take place at noon at The Church, on Delaware and Tupper. Admission is $15 and includes lunch. At 7:30 that evening he will deliver a free keynote lecture titled “Here Comes the Sun: The Solar Solution to Global Climate Change” at Slee Hall on the UB North Campus. UB Green has arranged his visit.