On June 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter invited reporters up to the White House roof for a ceremony to inaugurate the installation of 32 solar water-heating panels. America was in the midst of an energy freak-out, with long lines at gas stations and not-crazy fear that the U.S. economy was going to be starved by its dependence on foreign oil. And Carter was paying the price: his approval rating was 28 percent, the lowest of his presidency. On that summer day, Carter acknowledged that “some few Americans have reached a state of panic.” But instead of pandering to Americans and promising more oil and gas, he challenged them, insisting that “America was not built on timidity or panic.” Carter announced that he was committed to spending more than $1 billion “to stimulate solar and other renewable forms of energy,” in the expectation that within two decades 20 percent of the nation’s energy would be generated by solar power.
“In the year 2000,” Carter told the crowd on the rooftop that day, “this solar water heater behind me… will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy.” Then he added, prophetically, “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.”
Obviously, America did not take the road toward clean energy that Carter pointed toward on that day. In 1979, the U.S. relied on fossil fuels for about 90 percent of primary energy consumption. Today, fossil fuels still provide about 80 percent of the power consumed in America. But America’s failure is not Jimmy Carter’s failure. In fact, Carter had a visionary understanding of the road ahead, which only grows more profound with each passing year. “President Carter belongs at the top of any list of the greatest environmental presidents in American history,” says Gus Speth, chairman of Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality and a pioneering figure in the environmental movement.
It is a fair claim. Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark off to explore the West, vastly expanding scientific knowledge of the natural world. Teddy Roosevelt was a rugged outdoorsman who created more than 190 million acres of new national forests, parks, and monuments. Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” plan was also responsible for the creation of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966. Impeached crook Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protection Agency and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Barack Obama passed the Clean Power Plan and signed the Paris Climate Agreement. Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act will funnel $370 billion into climate and energy projects over the next decade.
But it was Carter who first addressed the essential fact of our time, which is that modern life as we know it today has been both created by and is being destroyed by our entanglement with fossil fuels. “The challenge facing this country is the moral equivalent of war,” Carter said in 1979. He was talking about the threat from OPEC oil producers to strangle the U.S. economy with high oil prices, not the threat of rising CO2 pollution to cook the planet. But it hardly mattered. He was the Greta Thunberg of the 1970s, saying bold, politically blunt things about greed and consumption and fossil fuel addiction that nobody wanted to hear. And this was all the more remarkable because he was not a Swedish teenager. He was the President of the United States.
Carter grew up barefoot and poor on a farm in southwestern Georgia. The farm had no electricity or running water, no diesel-fueled tractors, and of course no air-conditioning. He sweated in the fields with the other farmhands and felt the red dirt between his toes. He fished in the nearby rivers and lakes and learned to castrate a pig before he was old enough to drive and ate family meals of slaughtered steer brains mixed with scrambled eggs. But Carter was also a pragmatist. When he was 11, his father installed a windmill on their farm, giving them running water for the first time and showing young Jimmy the power of renewable energy. In the Navy, he became a nuclear engineer and risked his life to defuse a meltdown in an experimental nuclear reactor in Canada.
He also happened to be president during an energy crisis, when many Americans first woke up to the political and economic consequences of their fossil-fuel powered lives. As gas stations shut down in the 1970s and prices spiraled, Americans were at once terrified and angry. “Carter understood the dangers of fossil fuels from the geopolitics of it, which smacked him upside the head,” says Dan Dudek, a former senior economist with the Environmental Defense Fund. “How much of an environmental motivation he had for his actions is tough to say. But does that matter?”
Whatever Carter’s motivation may have been, his record on energy and environmental issues is clear. In his four years in office, he signed 15 major pieces of environmental legislation, including the first toxic waste cleanup and the first fuel-economy standards. His two major legislative accomplishments, the National Energy Act of 1978 and the Energy Security Act of 1980, transformed the energy landscape of America.
“So much happened in his four years and we still live with his administration’s effects today,” says Michael Webber, the Josey Centennial Professor in Energy Resources at the University of Texas, Austin and the author of Power Shift: The Story of Energy. Among other things, the legislation created the Department of Energy, which elevated energy to a cabinet-level priority and dramatically increased funding for energy research and development.
The legislation also began the deregulation of gas and power sectors, which opened the door for cheaper, cleaner power. “The decarbonization and decentralization that is well on its way in the electric utility industry today can be credited in large part to the policies started in the Carter Administration,” says James Van Nostrand, a law professor at West Virginia University and author of The Coal Trap: How West Virginia Was Left Behind in the Clean Energy Revolution. Van Nostrand points to the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act of 1978 (PURPA), which was part of the National Energy Act and broke up the power of electric utilities and encouraged competition in electricity generation markets. “All the competition that currently exists in the wholesale power markets can be traced back to the original incarnation of PURPA in 1978,” says Van Nostrand. PURPA also encouraged small power production facilities, primarily cogeneration and hydro. “A lot of what we know about distributed energy resources can be traced back to encouraging cogeneration, which is a much more efficient way to generate electricity, by capturing the waste heat and using it for some other industrial process,” says Van Nostrand. PURPA also required state regulators to think differently about how electricity is priced, encouraging time-of-use rates and requiring utilities to use load management techniques, which we now know today as demand response, to reduce energy usage.
None of this came without a fight. “The influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable,” Carter once complained, “and it’s impossible to arouse the public to protect themselves.”
Although Carter’s biggest accomplishments were in transforming the energy landscape, he also did more to protect America’s wild places than any president since Teddy Roosevelt. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (1980), which Carter engineered through a clever usage of executive power in the Antiquities Act, provided various levels of protection to 157 million acres — an area roughly the size of California and Oregon combined.
Carter’s energy and environmental legacy is not unblemished or uncontroversial. Gus Speth credits Carter for halting a headlong rush to build a new fleet of breeder reactors for electricity generation. “He stopped the plutonium economy before it could get started,” Speth argues. But other energy experts fault Carter for banning the reprocessing of nuclear waste, which essentially killed the evolution of nuclear power in the U.S. “As our one and only nuclear engineer president, he gutted the American nuclear industry forever with his decision not to reprocess nuclear waste,” Webber says. “He knew too much and the risks that reprocessing would enable loose weapons grade materials in a decade rife with terrorism made him nervous; we pay the price for that today.” Carter is also responsible for the Power Plant and Industrial Fuel Use Act of 1978, which Webber calls “one of our worse energy policies ever.” Webber argues that the legislation banned new natural gas power plants, leading to the development of 80 gigawatts of coal instead. “That’s had huge greenhouse gas and air pollution consequences that still live with us today,” Webber says.
On climate, Carter understood the threat of rising CO2 pollution as well as any scientist of his time. “Carter had started studying the issue in 1971,” biographer Jonathan Alter has said. “I found in his files from when he was governor underlinings in the journal Nature about carbon pollution and global warming. Other politicians played golf — Carter played tennis — but he was reading scientific journals. That’s how he got his jollies.”
By the time Carter took office, the risks of climate change were becoming well-documented throughout the federal government. Barely six months into Carter’s term, Frank Press, the President’s science adviser sent him a memorandum summarizing the threat from the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the warming that would result from it. “The urgency of the problem derives from our inability to shift rapidly to non-fossil fuel sources once the climatic effects become evident not long after the year 2000; the situation could grow out of control before alternate energy sources and other remedial actions become effective.” Although Press did not call for emergency action, he advised Carter that “we must now take the potential CO2 hazard into account in developing our long-term energy strategy.”
Other climate reports followed, including one in 1979 by a group of top scientists headed by meteorologist Jule Charney, titled “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment.” The Charney report, which is now remembered by historians as a prime example of how well scientists understood the threat of climate change nearly a half-century ago, stated that when the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doubled, the planet would most likely warm by three degrees Celsius — a calculation that is remarkably close to the best estimates today. “A warming … will probably be conspicuous within the next twenty years,” the report read, calling for early action: “Enlightened policies in the management of fossil fuels and forests can delay or avoid these changes, but the time for implementing the policies is fast passing.” Another report at the very end of Carter’s presidency by the White House Council on Environmental Quality reached similar conclusions. None of it was news to Carter, who directed the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a comprehensive, $1 million analysis of the greenhouse effect. “Carter was the first leader anywhere in the world who considered [climate change] a problem,” says Alter.
Although Carter talked about the risks of rising CO2 levels in several speeches, he never launched a campaign to directly confront climate change — in part because he was too consumed with the energy crisis in real-time and in part because he was too consumed with the politics of getting re-elected. If he had won a second term, would he have sounded the climate alarm? It would have been a complicated call for Carter, if only because he had backed coal — the most carbon-intensive of all fossil fuels — and synthetic fuels as a way to get off imported oil. But it’s hard to imagine that Carter would not have pushed global warming forward as a major issue.
“It’s been enormously frustrating to realize that if we had started with Carter and continued after his administration, we could have been on a smooth trajectory to reduce fossil fuel use,” Speth says. “If that had happened, we could be getting out of the fossil fuel business right now. But, of course, that’s not what happened.”
What happened was Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the anti-Carter, a president who saw consumption as next to godliness and economic growth as a religious force. He ripped the solar panels off the White House roof and they ended up on a farm in Maine, at the Smithsonian, and at a solar exhibit in China. He cut clean energy research and reduced taxes on oil and gas and made America safe again for fossil fuel barons. “The big oil companies finally have a friend in the White House,” the New Republic reported soon after Reagan took office in 1981.
And in many ways, America has never looked back. Carter had imaged that by 2020, America would be creating 20 percent of its electricity from the sun. The hard reality: In 2022, solar generated about 3 percent of U.S. electricity (all non-hydro renewables — wind, solar, biomass, geothermal — generate about 14 percent). Even more disturbing is the fact that U.S. CO2 emissions are about the same today as they were in 1976 when Carter took office. If you consider historical emissions, the U.S. is by far the largest contributor to the climate crisis. And without U.S. leadership, the climate crisis has only accelerated. From 1980 to 2019, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere grew from 339 parts per million to 419 ppm. “America’s energy policy of the last four decades is the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic,” Speth argues.
Carter himself never gave up the fight. When he was 92, he installed 3,852 solar panels on his land in Plains, Georgia, which create enough electricity to power half of the town. It was a powerful reminder, if such a reminder were needed, that when Carter installed the solar panels on the White House in 1979, he had been right about the direction the world was going, even if he had been wrong about the timing. Perhaps the most enduring aspect of Carter’s legacy on energy and the environment is that it forces us to remember that where we are today has been a choice. Carter did his part, both as president and as a citizen. It’s not too late for us to do ours.
