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Ramona Cornell du Houx is the president of the Solon Center for Research and Publishing, writer and communications director for Elected Officials to Protect America.
President Jimmy Carter was a great humanitarian, statesman and environmentalist who was ahead of his time. As a Navy submarine officer, he saw the clear and present danger of being reliant on fossil fuels, and as a farmer understood how important it was not to disrupt the climate with excess carbon. Although he wasn’t able to see his entire vision for a sustainable planet take place, he did make milestones federally that we take for granted today. He started America down the right path.
Without his actions the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which allocates close to $370 billion toward clean energy initiatives and tax breaks never could have happened. Nor would have Maine become the climate leader it is today with its transformative Maine Can’t Wait program.
I was fortunate to photograph Carter in New York during his second run for office and saw his passion for saving the planet and all who inhabit it firsthand. Although his negotiations to release the hostages held by Iran happened, he rarely gets credit for ending that crisis. That, and economic political winds, worked against him so he couldn’t progress his climate initiatives into a second term.
He saw inflation skyrocket because of a major energy crisis manipulated by OPEC, the oil cartel that cornered the market in fossil fuel energy. Carter boldly declared the “moral equivalent of war” to fight back. Unfortunately, in order to reduce oil imports and become less dependent on foreign crude, he had to negotiate to increase domestic coal production.
Back then the issues of a warming planet weren’t taken seriously enough by many lawmakers and the oil and gas industry influence in Washington, D.C., was too great. Still, after taking years of negotiations with Congress, Carter instituted green tax credits, signed legislation that started the U.S. Department of Energy and signed the Superfund law, which gave the government the mechanism to fund hazardous waste cleanups.
Soon after taking office, he ordered a study of “probable changes in the world’s population, natural resources, and environment.” The final report from the White House Council on Environmental Quality warned that fossil fuel combustion could cause “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social, and agricultural patterns.”
The report advised that to avoid such risks, we should limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — the goal eventually agreed to by nearly 200 nations, 35 years later in the Paris climate accord.
To reduce our carbon footprint and U.S. dependency on foreign oil he implemented the first vehicle fuel-efficiency standards. He also challenged researchers to bring down the cost of solar panels. To highlight the latter, Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof that his successor, Ronald Reagan, summarily removed.
“Nobody can embargo sunlight. No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters. It’s free from stench and smog,” Carter said in 1978 at the Colorado federally funded Solar Energy Research Institute, the predecessor to today’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Compared with 1980, solar panels today are significantly cheaper because of technological breakthroughs, costing around 1 percent of what they did back then. That’s a dramatic decrease in price and good reason why you see so many solar farms in Maine.
Having grown up in the countryside of Georgia, Carter deeply valued the natural world. In office, he doubled the size of the national park system and tripled the amount of federally protected wilderness.
If lawmakers had acted on all his initiatives, we would be in a better place facing the climate crisis today. Carter was a skilled negotiator to whom we owe a great deal — including a debt of gratitude for setting the stage for the climate actions we need to continue and expand today.
