Speaking with Bruce Severance on Renewable Energy

I just interviewed my friend Bruce Severance, who has been an outspoken advocate of renewable energy for several decades. “SURE I’ll talk to you,” he said when I called just now. “Did I tell you that I wrote my first report on solar energy when I was 11, and took a whole bunch of classes in environmental and architectural design in college? It’s been a passion of mine for a long time,” he explained. I was already aware of this — in a big way.

In the course of the conversation, he told me a few stories that I thought readers would find interesting. Here’s one:

“Corporate America has clearly been schizophrenic when it comes to the development of electric vehicles. We see evidence of this all the time. The GM story as told in ‘Who Killed The Electric Car’ is obviously one in which a certain group within GM really wanted the EV-1 to sell, where others didn’t want that at all, and worked hard to get it killed.

“Sometimes we’re suspicious that political lobbying is influential in the way these things get played out. But I was right there is the room one day and saw it happen right in front of me. My press pass had gotten me access to an interview that Martha Cone of the Los Angeles Times was doing with the head of CARB in 1992. She asked a direct question: ‘Was your decision to rescind the ZEV mandate in any way related to pressure you received from (then governor) Pete Wilson, the State Assembly, or any other governmental body?’

“We all watched in complete awe as he answered a totally different question. Fortunately, Cone persisted: ‘Perhaps I wasn’t clear,’ she said. I have a very specific question that I’d like you to answer.’ Which she then repeated verbatim. Again, his answer did not even touch about the focus of the question. You could have heard a pin drop in the room. He was blatantly refusing to answer the question. That was all the proof anyone could have needed.”

PS: Here’s an infographic that depicts the history of renewable energy at a glance.