Jimmy Carter raised climate change concerns 35 years before the Paris Accords

PLAINS, GEORGIA —

When Jimmy Carter chose designer designs for his presidential campaign, he left out the usual red, white and blue. He wanted green.

Highlighting how much the Georgia Democrat valued nature and prioritized environmental policy, the color became ubiquitous. On the buttons, the bumper stickers, the brochures, the sign renaming the old Plains railroad depot as his campaign headquarters. Even hometown election night.

“As soon as it was announced, we all had shirts to put on — and they were green, too,” said LeAnne Smith, Carter’s niece, remembering the 1976 victory celebration.

Nearly half a century later, environmental advocates remember Carter, who died Dec. 29 at age 100, as a president who elevated environmental stewardship, economies energy and discussions about the global threat of rising carbon dioxide levels.

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to abandon investments in renewable energy that President Joe Biden included in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, echoing how President Ronald Reagan dismantled solar panels installed by Carter on the roof of the White House. But politics aside, scientific consensus established Carter’s situation two generations earlier.

“President Carter was four decades ahead of his time,” said Manish Bapna, who heads the Natural Resources Defense Council. Carter called for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions long before “climate change” was part of the American lexicon, he said.

Wearing cardigans and setting standards

Former Vice President Al Gore, whose climate advocacy won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, called Carter “a role model for the entire environmental movement.”

As president, Carter implemented America’s first energy efficiency standards for passenger vehicles and appliances. He created the U.S. Department of Energy, which streamlined energy research and more than doubled the wilderness area protected by the National Park Service.

Inviting ridicule, Carter asked Americans to conserve energy by making personal sacrifices, including driving less and turning down thermostats in winter amid a global fuel shortage. He pushed renewable energy to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, calling for 20% of America’s energy to come from alternative sources by 2000.

But laments persist about what the 39th president couldn’t do or didn’t try before his crushing defeat to Ronald Reagan.

Fighting climate change

Carter left office in 1981 shortly after receiving a West Wing report linking fossil fuels to increasing carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere. Carter’s top environmental advisers called for “immediate” reductions in fossil fuel burning to reduce what scientists at the time called “carbon dioxide pollution.”

“Nobody in the world in a high government position was talking about this problem” before Carter, said biographer Jonathan Alter.

The White House released the findings, which sparked unforgettable media coverage: New York Times published his article on the 13th page of his first section. And with only a short time left in office, Carter could take no tangible action beyond the energy legislation he had already signed.

The report recommends limiting global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Thirty-five years later, in the 2015 Paris climate accords, participating countries set a similar goal.

“Had he been re-elected, it’s fair to say we would have started tackling climate change in the early 1980s,” Alter told the AP. “When you think about it, it almost adds a tragic dimension to his political defeat.”

Reagan ended high-level discussions on carbon emissions. He opposed efficiency standards because the government was going too far and rolled back some regulations. His chief of staff, Don Regan, called solar panels “a joke.”

Pursuing energy independence

Despite Carter’s emphasis on renewable sources, the fossil fuel industry benefited from his efforts toward U.S. energy independence.

Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Foundation, pointed to coal-fired power plants built during and shortly after Carter’s term, as well as his deregulation of natural gas production, a move O’Mara called “precursor” of widespread hydraulic fracturing. Bapna noted that Carter supported drilling off the coast of Long Island, New York and New England.

Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, cited Carter’s Synthetic Fuels Corporation, a short-lived effort to produce alternatives to fossil fuels that “would have resulted in much higher carbon emissions.” .

But Carter had the right priorities, including research and development coordinated by the Department of Energy, Nadel said. “It allowed us to have a national approach rather than one agency here and another there. »

Managing God’s Creation

Carter’s environmental interests had deep roots dating back to a rural childhood filled with hunting, fishing, and working his father’s farmlands.

“Jimmy Carter was an environmentalist before it was really part of the political debate — and I’m not talking about solar panels in the White House,” said Dubose Porter, a longtime leader of the Georgia Democratic Party. “Just focusing on that doesn’t convey how precocious he was and how committed he was.”

His early years influenced Carter as governor, Porter said, when he strengthened Georgia’s state parks system and opposed Georgia congressmen who wanted to dam a river. Carter traveled the waterway himself and decided its natural state outweighed the lucrative federal construction proposal.

In Washington, Carter continued his sometimes unwinnable fights against funding for projects he deemed harmful and unnecessary. He was more successful in extending federal protection to more than 60.7 million acres, including the redwood forests of California and large swaths of Alaska.

Randall Balmer, a professor at Dartmouth College who has written about Carter’s faith, said he saw himself as a steward of divinely bestowed natural resources.

“It’s a real connection that young evangelicals still have with him today,” Balmer said.

Condemn consumerism

Carter won the presidency amid energy shortages rooted in global conflicts, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East, so national security and economic interests dovetailed with Carter’s religious beliefs and affinity for nature, Nadel noted.

Carter likened the energy crisis to “the moral equivalent of war” and, as inflation and gas pipelines increased, he called for individual sacrifice and radical action on renewable energy.

“Human identity is no longer defined by what we do, but by what we own,” Carter warned in 1979. “But we have discovered that owning things and consuming them do not satisfy our thirst. meaning.”

This “unease” speech – so dubbed by the media although Carter did not use the word – was unique in presidential politics because of its condemnation of unchecked American consumerism. Carter celebrated the fact that more than 100 million Americans had watched it. In 2010, Carter acknowledged in his annotated “White House Journal” that his speech had been a failure, but said it had proven prescient in advocating bold and direct action on energy.

“It’s safe to say that the Carter presidency is still producing results today,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, whose 2020 presidential campaign focused on climate action. “I learned in politics that timing is everything and chance is everything.”