When a group of dignitaries and journalists made a rare foray to the roof of the White House, Jimmy Carter had something to show them: 32 solar water-heating panels.
“A generation from now,” the US president declared, “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.”
What happened next is the stuff of tragic what-ifs and what-might-have-beens. “It did become a curiosity, it is a museum piece and it certainly is an example of a road not taken,” said Alice Hill, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank in Washington. “He was prescient that we were at the fork in the road. And we didn’t take that road.”
A few months after that solar panel unveiling in June 1979, Carter, who died last Sunday aged 100, lost his bid for re-election in a landslide, in part because of a major energy crisis and soaring oil and gas prices. He was long seen as a one-term failure. But subsequent reappraisals have suggested that his environmental legacy, including pioneering efforts in land conservation and renewable energy, reveals a man ahead of his time.
Soon after taking office in the winter of 1977, Carter delivered a fireside address entreating the public to drop their thermostats in an effort to reduce the need for fossil fuels. “Without public conversation, there may not be enough energy to allocate,” he said, wearing a now famous beige sweater.
That year he also signed legislation creating the Department of Energy. But Carter would face opposition from the oil and gas industry and members of his own party. His renewable energy plan, seeking to establish tax credits for solar panel installations and calling for renewables to comprise 20% of the nation’s energy by 2000, failed to pass in Congress. The 20% goal has still not been achieved today.
However, Carter made more headway with environmental legislation, including initiating the first federal toxic waste cleanups and creating the first fuel economy standards. There were initiatives to preserve rivers, establish national parks and protect California’s redwood forest.
Perhaps most notably, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, providing protections for 157m acres (64m hectares) of land through the creation of national parks, refuges and conservation areas. The move saved the Alaskan wilderness from timber and oil industries that were salivating over its natural resources.
Jim Pattiz, who along with his brother Will is a film-maker, environmentalist and co-director of the 2021 documentary Carterland, said: “I can say this with absolute confidence: Jimmy Carter protected more land than any other human in history that we know of. That’s something worthy of admiration and something I feel like people need to know about.
“We talk about Theodore Roosevelt in this country as being the great conservationist, and he certainly was, but Jimmy Carter surpassed him in many ways and stepped into the breach at a time when things could have gone either way.”
Like Roosevelt, Carter had his flaws. He succumbed to political expediency to push for increased domestic coal production – an industry that has helped accelerate global heating. In a 1980 campaign speech to miners in West Frankfort, Illinois, he declared: “America indeed is the Saudi Arabia of coal.”
Still, Carter’s biographer, Jonathan Alter, has described him as the first global leader to recognise the problem of climate change. Alter notes that Carter, who had been a nuclear engineer in the navy, began studying climate change in 1971, underlining articles about carbon pollution and global warming in the journal Nature.
In 1977, Carter received a memo from Frank Press, his chief scientific adviser, entitled Release of Fossil CO2 and the Possibility of a Catastrophic Climate Change. It warned that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a “greenhouse effect” that “will induce a global climatic warming”.
Carter commissioned the Global 2000 Report, which warned that large-scale burning of oil, coal and other fossil fuels could lead to “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social, and agricultural patterns”. Urging “immediate action”, the report recommended that industrialised nations agree on the safe maximum level of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.
Had Carter been re-elected, he might well have acted. But Reagan shunned the issue and the fossil fuel industry started spending tens of millions of dollars to sow doubt about climate science. Democrat Al Gore’s defeat in the 2000 presidential election doomed America to more wasted opportunities. Donald Trump dismissed climate change as a Chinese “hoax” and withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords.
Hill, of the Council on Foreign Relations, commented: “It has made for very jagged progress and also undermined the understanding in the American people of the nature of the threat and the need for action much sooner rather than later.”
She added: “Thinking about Carter made me sad because I realised that he tried to be above politics and set the nation on the right course. He couldn’t do it and we have continued to pay the price. It’s not just Americans paying the price, of course – it’s the rest of the globe because we didn’t take that fork in the road.”
Pattiz, however, finds comfort in Carter’s legacy: “If we’re wanting to remember and honor him, I hope that Americans can look at that and say, wow, we had a missed opportunity but the fact that we did ever elect somebody like that, at least that says something good about us in terms of maybe we could again.”
As Carter feared that June day in 1979, the White House solar panels did become museum pieces at venues such as the Smithsonian Institution and his presidential library. But in 2017 he watched nearly 4,000 solar panels go up in his home town of Plains, Georgia – enough to power more than half the town. At the dedication event Carter told the crowd: “This site will be as symbolically important as the 32 panels we put on the White House. People can come here and see what can be done.”
