Pirate's Cove

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Jimmy Carter’s environmental legacy set the foundation for today’s climate action

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, died at his home in Plains, Ga., on Sunday. He was 100.

Carter’s interest in promoting renewable energy was on display at his January 20, 1977 presidential inauguration. Solar panels were installed to warm the reviewing stand near the White House, where Carter watched the inaugural parade.

“It happened to be one of the coldest days of the year that morning and very little sun,” says Paul Muldawer, the Atlanta architect Carter tapped to design his inauguration facilities.

“We made a statement, although it honestly didn’t work as well as I would have liked it to work,” Muldawer says. Wind chill that day was in the teens, according to the National Weather Service.

So, his gesture was a failure. Surprise? His term of office started out as failure. The podium was torn down and recycled, the solar panels gone

The inauguration set the stage for Carter’s four years as President. His environmental legacy has shaped how the country is responding to climate change today.

“At the time that Jimmy Carter was president, his biggest concern was energy security,” says Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab at New York University.

Yeah, and he did it exactly wrong. He made energy security worse.

The summer after Carter took office, he received a memo with the subject “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.”

The memo was from Frank Press, Carter’s chief advisor on scientific matters and the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Press wrote, “The present state of knowledge does not justify emergency action to limit the consumption of fossil fuels in the near term.” But he did write that considering the “potential CO2 hazard” should become part of the country’s long-term energy strategy.

The top of the memo is marked “THE PRESIDENT HAS SEEN.” Climate change, though, was not an issue Carter highlighted during his time in office. He actually boosted domestic coal production. Coal is the most carbon-intense fuel for generating electricity.

Well, at least he wasn’t dumb enough to try and ditch coal.

Preserving land also was a priority for Carter. Near the end of his presidency, he signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. It provided protections for 157 million acres of land through the creation of national parks, refuges and conservation areas.

Carter was good at being an environmentalist, which used to be separate from ‘climate change’ till the cult subsumed it.