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Carter’s Environmental Legacy

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I gave an interview to the Macon Telegraph on Jimmy Carter’s environmental legacy. It’s my take that Carter is the greatest environmental president in American history. When he passes, I’ll have a more complete discussion of this, but here is an excerpt from the interview:

Q: Jimmy Carter famously put solar panels on the White House. I suspect for most people, if they know anything about Jimmy Carter and the environment, it probably ends there. Can you fill that story in? A: The 1970s was a period in which environmental issues played a bigger role in our politics and were much more bipartisanly supported, at least in the early ‘70s. And so Carter is kind of operating in a world in which there’s a lot of support for this, at least at first. When Carter takes the presidency and comes into power in 1977, the U.S. for the first time is really having to think about its energy use. The oil embargo in 1973 and then the related general economic problems of the 1970s really kind of begin to reshape how, or at least have a potential to reshape, the ways in which Americans think about their environment and particularly their energy use.

Think about it — these ‘70s cars were getting, you know, eight, 10 miles a gallon and gas was really cheap. In the postwar consumer suburban world with the freeways and everybody owning cars, nobody really has to think about energy. But with the larger political and geopolitical world of that time, all of a sudden Americans do. And so there’s a big push to get Americans off of foreign energy. And yeah, there maybe were some xenophobic sides to that, but Carter doesn’t really play into that. He’s wanting to promote renewable energy. The solar panels on the roof of the White House is symbolic, of course, that he himself is going to be an example to Americans on a more sustainable or responsible behavior, which was very much of Carter’s way of thinking about the world. And so he’s promoting ideas and legislation that, for instance, would have gotten the U.S. to 20% renewable energy use by the year 2000. Well, it’s now 2023 and we’re not at 20% renewable energy. If the nation had listened to Jimmy Carter around these energy issues back in the 1970s, we would be in much better shape for dealing with the climate crisis today. Although he was not necessarily talking about climate change, he was warning us about the use of fossil fuels and other non-renewable energy and was trying to lay the groundwork to transition America onto that.

This gets into the famous speech where he’s giving a talk in the Oval Office and he’s wearing a sweater and he’s telling Americans to turn their thermostats down to 68 degrees or whatever it was. And Americans kind of respond with some ridicule and it doesn’t really help Carter very much, but, you know, he’s right. There’s no question that he was trying to push us off of fossil fuels toward renewable energy and the nation didn’t listen.

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