Promote Carbon-Reducing Labor

In the United States, people are more present at home than they have been in many decades, through telecommuting or through joblessness. Some of these people use south-facing awnings and window shades. A smaller subset may wish to adjust that equipment for maximum effect. Let’s enlarge that population in two ways. First, change the building codes of California and every state to encourage proper cardinal orientation and the equipment to regulate sunlight. Second, let’s promote care for the environment through the efficient, attentive use of sunlight. Ennoble that responsibility with a name: solar care. Consider it part of the economy of care—alongside raising children and healing the sick. And then consider complementing that rhetoric with a paycheck, a universal basic income. Given the crisis of planetary security, we need salaried solar care as much as every other form of care.

The model for this proposal is “passive” solar energy. It’s called that because it involves no electricity—supposedly the “active” part of energy. In the 1970s, environmentalists, back-to-the-landers and off-grid types, installed greenhouses, solar masses, and other household technologies. Prototypes sprouted up in Arizona, Colorado, and in other inhospitably hot and cold locales. Even there, you could heat and cool your house—and light it during the day—by regulating solar rays and managing solar-heated air. Homeowners boasted of their success. But enthusiasts had difficulty scaling up. Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution speaks only vaguely about “maximum energy efficiency” for buildings and appears to overlook passive solar.1 The latest update to California’s building code—which mandates panels and batteries in new construction—neglects efficiency and passive solar entirely.2

How have good planners forgotten such effective measures? Passive solar requires a lot of foresight. One has to orient a new structure toward the sun (facing south in the northern hemisphere) and avoid shading that exposure. One cannot simply pack office buildings, row houses, or detached houses in a tight grid. Retrofitting is even more complex. Building codes frequently discourage architects, construction firms, and remodelers from taking the most expedient or profitable course. At root, however, there is an issue that building codes cannot address: The resident of passive solar home has to work. For best results, they should open and close windows, adjust awnings and other shades, and refrain from blocking certain floors and heat-absorbing walls. They should perform these tasks at the right time—according to angles of sunlight and flows of air throughout the day and as the seasons change. Passive solar, in other words, is not passive at all. It is something that the user does as a form of care, and many people perform this work unremarkably every day. So far, descriptions and proposals for an economy of care—alongside so many sustainability codes—have neglected passive solar energy and the care work it requires. Overlooking such “solar care” serves no one. Renewable energy and at-home attendants need each other. The awning adjuster—properly recognized and supported through a basic income—may yet reduce carbon emissions and help stabilize the climate and ensure well-being.

According to the National Academies of Sciences, “our energy supply comes mainly from fossil fuels, with nuclear power and renewable resources rounding out the mix.”3 What does “supply” mean? Oil and gas travel through supply lines of pipe and pumps—measured and sold at each link of the supply chain. Those fuels give the world five terawatts of energy and sell for roughly $5 trillion per year.4 Renewables are measured and sold as they spin a turbine or otherwise generate electricity. Solar, wind, waves, hydropower, and geothermal give the world close to half a terawatt and are now pushing a trillion dollars of annual value.5 These are “supplies.” Meanwhile, the sun sends us 128,000 terawatts. Where does it go? Some photons drive photosynthesis, producing plant life—including the food we eat and the oxygen we breathe. Sunlight produces wind, and a good number of terawatts heat the atmosphere. And—because no middleman or corporation has figured out how to capture and sell these terawatts—everyone gets more than enough of them for free. To the National Academy, these are not supplies; they have no lines or chains. What energy industries and governments can’t monetize, they count as zero.

The ancients—designing and inventing long before people counted much of anything in nature—had a better of grasp of sunlight. As John Perlin writes, China was using solar architecture deliberately by at least 1200 BCE. Ban Gu, a poet of the second century CE, refers to a house’s southern “door of established brightness.” In the southwest of the structure, occupants nestle in their “cozy corner.”6 Orientation—a term that refers to the East and the rising sun—set the foundation. Greeks took a slightly more nuanced, seasonal approach. In the Mediterranean, a southern exposure could give one too much of a good thing. Socrates advocated that the dwelling be “cool in the summer and warm in the winter.”7 South-facing porticos, or shaded porches, would achieve this effect. In summer, as Socrates also taught, the porch’s roof would block high sun. Winter sun, reaching Athens and Sparta at a lower angle, would pass through the porch to heat the interior. Before the invention of glass, on the north side, small, high windows would vent summer heat without letting the cold, northerly winter winds enter the house. A narrow house—long in the east–west direction—would amplify all these effects.8 Everything centered on regulation and modulation, using shade and exposure to dampen and direct the firehose of photons coming from our star. Thus, the basic principles of solar architecture—angles, geometry, and air flow—are as old as physics and philosophy.

Southern Europe’s vernacular traditions commonsensically situate houses, windows, and trellises for solar regulation. Spanish masonry and adobe act as thermal masses, storing daytime winter sun and releasing it indoors for nighttime heating. Europe’s dense cities, however, constrain orientation and, as they built upward, spread artificial shadow. The countryside has always afforded greater freedom. In the nineteenth century, English manors began to retrofit glass conservatories for winter heat.9 From the ground level, these sun rooms impelled warm air upward to the salon and drawing room. In a more democratic twentieth century, planners wondered how the city could give everyone access to sunlight, primarily for germ-control and health. Parisian row houses on an east–west axis required a southern buffer of empty land equal to two and a half times their height. Those on an east–west axis necessitated a free perimeter of one and a half times the height. Socialist-leaning French and German planners built public housing accordingly. But the Nazis saw workers’ housing as a Communist plot and put an end to it.10 And then war intervened. By the 1950s—as Europe rebuilt—fossil fuels replaced the sun. The buffers filled with more apartment buildings, shrouding the neighborhood in permanent shadow.

By the time designers and dreamers coined the phrase “passive solar,” it occupied only a niche within the sustainability discourse. The 2005 Handbook of Renewable Energies in the European Union does not even mention the technology.11 The U.S. Green Building Council does a little better. It gives LEED certification to windows with appropriate southern exposure, shading, and thermal masses. Paul Hawken’s Drawdown plan combines passive and active forms of solar energy. “Net zero buildings” generate electricity from PV panels while consuming less of it, due to passive solar.12 What about a homeowner who—for reasons of expense or tree coverage—forgoes PV and practices only solar architecture? Princeton’s Net Zero America plan cuts through the confusion by simply ignoring the nonelectrical. Its most ambitious scenario relies upon “nearly full electrification of transport and buildings by 2050.”13 Many advocates of renewables now tell us to “electrify everything.” Hook all your gadgets to the grid and run that grid on sun, wind, and other renewables.

Such electron zealotry underlies the California building codes and Florida’s Babcock Ranch.14 In 2005, investors bought this property outside Punta Gorda and built a seventy-five-megawatt solar array. Then, they looked for settlers of the new town who would consume that electricity. The “ambassador”—who took me for a prospective buyer when I called—had not heard of passive solar design. I explained, and he referred me to the six building firms hired for the project. One of them, Florida Lifestyles, features a plantation-style covered veranda. That’s good design, I said, checking the web. Can one be sure to orient the veranda to the south? Only if the streetside is south, the ambassador told me. Even then, I saw, the two-car garage will shade front windows on a winter afternoon. Could you build the house without the garage? A polite “no” from the ambassador ended our call.

Babcock Ranch and its equivalents are drawing lessons from a modern Greek experiment. The investors don’t realize it—and they are drawing the wrong lessons. In 1981, the German and Greek governments signed a deal to design and build a “solar village” in the suburbs north of Athens. The project promised to set a standard for Europe.15 Three years later, 435 apartments began to rise in rows terraced on a south-facing hill. Units varied in size and conservation measures. The thirty-four more advanced apartments contained the full gamut of passive features: large southern exposures, plus south-facing sun rooms on the second floor. On the first and third floor of each unit, the winter sun would hit raised troughs and walls filled with water. Those thermal masses would heat during the day and radiate warmth during the cold nights. For heating, these units would use only 10 percent of the typical Athenian’s electricity budget for heating.16 So estimated the renowned architect Alexandros Tombazis. For summer cooling, awnings would shade the entire southern side while windows at the top of each north floor ventilated hot air. The confident Tombazis left air conditioners off his drawings.

Problems began as soon as construction ended. The Greek government’s Workers’ Housing organization recruited occupants, attempting to screen for motivation. The thirty-four fully passive units would require particular devotion. Vivian Loftness, one of the Cologne-based planners, warned of “daily management and caretaking” and, in comparison with any other dwelling, “far greater personal commitment.”17 On a Zoom call, she reiterated that advice to me and shared the handbook she and her colleagues disseminated to residents. Cartoons show a woman leaning over the water trough to clean an interior, first-floor window. In another image, a man balances—his left foot on the top step of a free-standing ladder—while cleaning an exterior, second-floor window. The work does not look easy or entirely safe. Loftness also wrote a set of exhortations to be translated into Greek: “You live in a passive solar house. . . . At the beginning of winter, wash all the glass, cover the green house vents to the outside, open greenhouse vents into house floor, raise or take down awnings, wash glass and reflector surface, cover the whole house fan. Every winter morning open the rolladen shutters, open blinds to monthly setting, open reflective insulation, open the living room door to the greenhouse, leave inside doors open.” Then do the reverse every winter night and change it all back at the beginning of summer.

Did aspiring residents wish to manipulate and manage their apartments in these ways? Perhaps some did. The Ministry, however, made a distractingly sweet offer: rent of only sixty euros per month.18 That subsidy surely flooded the applicant pool with Athenians needing or desiring the cheapest roof over their heads.

Nonetheless, initial reports were good. The apartments filled in 1989 and 1990. German and Greek sociologists evaluated the development in 1992. “From the beginning,” they found, “a real interest—or rather affection—was created among the inhabitants.” They were sharing the many common spaces as an intentional community. Meanwhile, these neighbors showed “full respect for the Building Regulations,” that is, for the guidelines on window cleaning and so on.19 Perhaps the sociologists did not dig deep enough. Perhaps they did not perceive the subtle hardening of the cartoon “handbook”—as Loftness called it—into formal “Building Regulations.”

Certainly, the battle lines were drawn by 2003, when Achilles Kalogridis conducted an evaluation for his master’s degree of architecture. Residents, wrote Kalogridis in his thesis, felt like “guinea pigs, people used for some stranger’s scientific experiments.”20 Thermometers and electric meters tracked them. They felt surveilled, regulated, and trapped—“hostages” of the Workers’ Housing Organization, as some wrote in letter of complaint to Parliament.21 While renting, the solar villagers had accumulated no equity. In rapidly gentrifying Athens, they could not afford to lease or buy alternative accommodation. Meanwhile, the thirty-four passive apartments had decayed noticeably. Parents—who couldn’t move to larger apartments as their families grew—converted the conservatories into playrooms. Sunlight fell on carpets, cribs, and plastic toys, objects that neither stored heat nor radiated it effectively. In winter, residents left their awnings down for privacy from the street. Villagers had lost their cartoon books and were simply waiting for the authorities to fix things. Kalogridis, who later joined Tombazis’s firm, was embarrassed. “I must admit,” he told me, looking away from his Zoom screen, “they really didn’t care.”

Then things got worse. In the 2010s, climate change blasted Athens with horrendous summer heat waves. Solar villagers responded by installing air conditioning and running it all the time. The government offered to finally transfer ownership of the apartments, but residents dropped that demand. “We would be naive if we accepted,” said the president of the solar village in 2017, “since we do not know . . . how the [original] equipment works and is maintained.”22 In early 2021, the press called the development a “fiasco” and a “grandiose plan” that should never have been pursued.23 Tombazis, having published on the solar village repeatedly in the 1990s, grew silent. His 2010 career retrospective merely notes “the critical significance of the inhabitants’ behavior for success or otherwise.”24 The outcome was obviously otherwise, possibly to the extent of humiliation. Or cynicism: I visited the solar village in 2022 and found utter resignation. “It doesn’t work at all,” said one man about the solar features. He blamed “the government.” A large pile of fire wood lay beside one greenhouse.

Apartment buildings in Athens typically rise four to six stories with balconies on every floor. They are not passive solar projects, but many function along those lines. From each apartment, writes Marias Iordanidou in her urban tale Our Yard, “balcony doors . . . go onto a balcony where the building lives.”25 The building lives there because someone has rolled the awning down during the summer day, preventing cement from absorbing heat and radiating it back. Someone has rolled that awning up carefully in the long, late afternoon. They may have also watered plants, causing an evaporative, cooling effect. Regulations are neither necessary nor helpful. As in the solar village, they are probably counterproductive.

Now, taking the wrong lesson from that fiasco, electron zealots would substitute machines for all that history, culture, and mindfulness. Loftness recommends high-end, automated window treatments. Motors tucked tastefully in the top bar will raise and lower the shade at preprogrammed times or temperatures. The latter option might replace a person—if your thermostat can track clouds. That is where automation falls short. Delay your purchase, warns a review of the leading shades, “until they become more affordable and some of the technical performance errors are rectified.”26 One would also have to improve the technical performance of our fire- and flood-prone electric grid. The fully electric society is brittle.

Human presence is resilient: the original and better grid. Think about that for a moment. Care operates as a set of relationships—perhaps an infrastructure—among people and between people and things. The labor of care ensures that equipment, bodies, and minds facilitate and complete one another. Care is the application of mindfulness to relationships. It is everything that electricity lacks. It functions when electricity fails us—and, in fact, especially when the grid goes down and we need each other. Even more so, solar care avails of two abundant resources often neglected in electric grids: sunlight and people. Let’s put them at the center of a new, caring energy practice of sustainability.