Steve Baer Quotes

[C]oal, oil and natural gas are all solar energy products... and hydroelectric power is solar energy...

When you start experimenting with, say, solar heating by covering collectors with glass or plastic and feeling the warm air blow out of them... well, it’s so exciting that you just get hooked and can’t stop.

[T]he philosophical tactics and... approach taken by the giant corporations and... power groups miss the point... A pencil can break on you and you can sharpen it with your thumbnail and go right on... but if a circuit board or a resistor or condenser quits somewhere inside this recorder, we’re stopped and there’s probably not a lot we can do about it. ...[Y]et we increasingly use tape recorders instead of pencils.

[W]e haven’t had the money... to tool up to manufacture the parts for the playground climbers on a competitive basis. The people... simply can’t afford to buy them. ...[T]hey just can’t hold their own in the market and so we’re not building them anymore.

We’ve built two greenhouses utilizing the beadwall, and our test results show... it will do much of the heating and cooling required by an average office building or home.

[W]e would be much better informed if alongside every graph showing our use of oil, coal and uranium there were also an indication or the total energy received from the sun. Since we can't do without it, let's not omit it from our accounts.

[T]he beadwall insulated window panels... this wonderful invention of David C. Harrison’s... a kind of super curtain that... transform[s] a clear dual-panel of glass into an opaque, well-insulated wall and back again.

We built and did solar heating experiments... solar heated a dome in 1967 with a big chimney—a rock storage bin—down the side of a hill. Many of those first things didn’t... work... well. I didn’t know what I was doing.

If you drive to... buy a newspaper the gasoline consumption appears. If you walk—using food energy—the event has disappeared from sight...

The great problem with movable insulation is cracks. A door, shutter, or curtain is placed... The optimist notes the R value... but does not achieve it.

The forms possible using this system are limitless; there is no attempt here to explore these possibilities—the examples shown are small probings. The booklet describes the mathematics of the process that creates these limitless forms.

This booklet had first an elementary explanation of the geometry of Zonohedra, then a more difficult account of the growths of the thirty-one zone star. This system, based on the 31 lines that pass through the center of an and either a vertex, edge midpoint of face midpoint is new and unusual.

You don't need to have a [government energy] policy... there already is a policy—it's each individual's policy. We need the government for some things like the armed forces, but not in the marketplace.

[T]here's Dave Harrison's bead wall. I teach... classes at the University of New Mexico and Dave... one of my students... said. "...I've got this idea of building a wall out of two panes of glass... and you can blow Styrofoam beads between the panes at night to insulate the wall." ...Here's a problem ...nobody has thought of a way to solve. I've tried... and... Harold Hay has... and... a lot of others... Dave Harrison has the answer! ...[A] ...low-tech ...answer ...simple ...easy to understand, that a heating and ventilating man in any town can fix... [W]e’ve made a deal with Dave so that he’ll get a big part of any royalties we realize...

I care about the spirit of innovation... I'm an inventor, but it's a bad time for people to do that. Many of us who developed the ideas behind direct gain heating—and have been successful—our ideas have been co-opted by the government, and it's disappointing that the government does not now turn to us for new ideas. ...They're stacking the decks against the little guy ...