A slice of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which today might be covered with oil drilling rigs had Carter not protected it, a move for which he was heavily criticized, with a significant number of Democrats opposed. The fight over ANWR has continued sporadically for the past 45 years, with Democrats unified around that protection. But the region could soon be at risk once again with a Republican White House, Senate, and House of Representatives trifecta running the country.
Kai Bird is a distinguished journalist and author of a slew of books, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer and, in 2021, what I think is the best of the three Carter biographies on my shelves, titled The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. Nearly two years ago, he wrote an essay on Carter’s environmental vision and achievements at Yale 360e—Unheralded Environmentalist: Jimmy Carter’s Green Legacy. No excerpt can do it justice, but here’s one anyway:
Just before leaving office, Carter released a prophetic report, largely written by Speth, that predicted “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social and agricultural patterns” if humanity continued to rely on fossil fuels. The Global 2000 Report to the President became an early clarion call for scientists studying climate change.
History will judge Carter as a president ahead of his time. He set a goal of producing 20 percent of the nation’s energy from renewable sources by 2000. In an age of soaring energy prices and stagflation, he famously wore a cardigan on national television during a fireside chat in which he urged Americans to lower their thermostats and conserve energy. He put solar water heating panels on the roof of the White House, telling reporters, “A generation from now this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.” Ironically, while Carter put federal money into solar energy research, a few years later his successor Ronald Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House roof — and a few are still displayed in museums.
Carter spent much of his time in office trying to deal with energy issues. He proposed a 283-page National Energy Act (NEA) that included a tax on oversized, gas-guzzling cars, tax credits for home insulation, and investments in solar and wind technologies. Carter insisted that his energy bill was the “moral equivalent of war.” In response, The Wall Street Journal labeled it with the sarcastic acronym MEOW. Republican Party chairman Bill Brock charged that the president was “driving people out of their family cars.” Michigan Democratic Congressman John Dingell told Carter aides that it was an “asinine bill.” The legislation nevertheless passed the House, but then encountered much more opposition in the Senate. Carter complained in a private White House diary, “The influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable, and it’s impossible to arouse the public to protect themselves.”
Some things clearly haven’t changed.
The energy bill that passed in 1978 was a complicated piece of legislation, with tax incentives for wind and solar, requirements for more efficient appliances, and big sums for research into these and other renewable sources. But there was also support for using more fossil fuels. Natural gas price controls were deregulated. This spurred more drilling and eventually led to a vast expansion of hydraulic fracturing, the “fracking” that has made the United States the largest producer and exporter of natural gas in the world.
In addition, the Synthetic Fuel Corporation was allocated $88 billion over 12 years to spur development of gasification and liquefaction of coal. Some $20 billion of this was designated to turn the kerogen oil shale deposits of Colorado and Utah into petroleum. Exxon predicted in a 1980 “white paper” that it would be producing 8 million barrels of oil a day from this source by the year 2000. Instead, plummeting oil prices, the Reagan administration’s demolishing of incentives, and technological issues meant that not a commercial drop of the stuff ever made it to market. Given the disastrous impact on land, water, and wildlife that would have occurred in the region, that counts as a very good thing.
Overall, however, Carter brought to the White House an unprecedented environmental stance that was “visionary,” as Jonathan Alter, the author of the biography His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, writes in a new essay:
Energy and the environment are instructive examples, and not just because he forged the nation’s first green energy policy, doubled the size of the national park system, pushed through the first real fuel economy standards and approved the first toxic waste cleanup.
His placement of solar panels on the roof of the White House (later removed by Reagan) was symbolic but backed up by major bills that promoted solar for the first time. And he was ambitious for more. At the Carter Library in Atlanta, I found articles about global warming in scientific journals of the early 1970s that he had underlined.
By the end of his presidency, he became the first leader anywhere in the world to advocate slowing carbon emissions. The levels of necessary reduced emissions identified by the Carter White House in 1980 were identical to those ratified 35 years later by the Paris Climate Accords—which lends a tragic dimension to that year’s election.
No telling what might have happened if Carter had won a second term. What we do know is that the budget for research and development into renewables didn’t reach the (inflation-adjusted) level of Carter’s final budget until Barack Obama’s presidency three decades later.
—Meteor Blades
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