Jimmy Carter Might Have Saved the Climate, If the Country Had Let Him Try

It’s an old and well-worn story, of course. On June 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter stood in front of 32 newly installed solar panels on the White House roof, and announced a set of recommendations he sent to Congress regarding a grand new solar strategy.

“Today, in directly harnessing the power of the Sun, we’re taking the energy that God gave us, the most renewable energy that we will ever see, and using it to replace our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels,” he said.

Carter’s proposals for a “coordinated government-wide effort” on solar power included spending $1 billion the next fiscal year and sustaining the effort for years to follow. “It will not be a temporary program,” said the president, who died on Sunday at 100. The long-term goal was ambitious: “By the end of this century, I want our nation to derive 20 percent of all the energy we use from the sun.”

Carter’s goals, though in the short term functioning as responses to the ongoing oil crises (not to mention the Three Mile Island accident, just a few months prior), would have doubled as a potentially climate-saving lightning bolt of a change. And this wasn’t entirely an accident — the science on global warming was by then fairly well understood, and reports had started coming into the Oval Office since at least the previous decade, when a 1965 report on “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment” landed on Lyndon Johnson’s desk with recommendations about rising CO2 levels. Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality issued at least three looks at “carbon dioxide pollution.”

The last of those CEQ reports, released the day before Carter ceded the White House to Ronald Reagan, insisted that “the CO2 issue” should be considered a high priority for the government. “The conclusion seems inescapable that the CO2 problem should not be isolated from current debate on long-term energy strategy,” it read. “However, that isolation effectively exists today.” There was a need to examine “alternative global energy futures,” with a particular focus on limiting the expansion of fossil fuel use, and to “accelerate the use of renewable energy sources.”

This did not, of course, happen. Ronald Reagan’s environmental record is, obviously, catastrophic, including drastic funding cuts for Department of Energy renewables research. He let Carter’s solar power tax credits expire in 1985; a year later, the solar panels on the White House roof were quietly removed, not to return until the Obama administration. And this was as the drumbeat on the need for urgent action to stave off what we see out the window today was getting louder, even from within Reagan’s administration. A 1983 report from the Environmental Protection Agency on how to “delay a greenhouse warming” put it cleanly, in one of the most frustrating public policy-related lines ever written: “[T]he shift away from fossil fuels perhaps could be instituted more gradually and therefore less expensively if energy policies were adopted now rather than several decades later.”

Policies like, say, the ones Jimmy Carter was pushing for in the waning days of his presidency. What would the world be like if the U.S. really had managed 20 percent of its energy from the sun in 2000, still six years before China overtook this country for the global lead in annual greenhouse gas emissions? Impossible to say, of course, but it wouldn’t look like this one.

In 2023, in terms of total energy consumption, the U.S. managed somewhere between two and three percent from the sun; oil and gas combined, those “dwindling” fossil fuels Carter mentioned in the midst of the 1970s oil shocks, accounted for 71 percent. If you just consider electricity generation (meaning, excluding transportation and other major energy uses), it’s not much better: solar accounted for 3.9 percent of utility-scale generation in 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration. Solar power is undeniably booming, and the cost decreases Carter hoped for have arrived in dramatic fashion; but oil and gas are booming too. That day in 1979 Carter wanted the sun to help the US “move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil” — mission accomplished, largely, though only because he included the word “foreign.” Instead, the U.S. leads the world in both oil and gas production, thanks to the fracking boom and enormous expansions under the last several presidencies, including Obama and Biden.

“Solar energy will not pollute our air or water. We will not run short of it. No one can ever embargo the Sun or interrupt its delivery to us,” Carter said then. “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.” As we close the books on the (again) warmest year in recorded history, it’s hard not to imagine that adventure if the country had been ready to listen.