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On Jimmy Carter’s Inauguration Day in 1977, the new president made a deliberate environmental statement: He used a public-facing array of solar panels to heat his lectern. He would later install water-boiling solar connections on the White House roof to be used year-round too. To commemorate Jimmy Carter, the peanut-loving former chief executive who died at age 100 on Sunday, observers of his oft-maligned term have celebrated one of its undeniable blessings: Carter’s dedication to environmental protection.
His record is extensive: In the early 1970s, when he was Georgia’s governor, Carter pioneered government-led environmentalism: He established programs to preserve the state’s natural landscapes and encouraged state workers to cut back their power use in the office and at home. As president, he kick-started the national Department of Energy, imposed the first fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles, and preserved millions of acres of land, primarily in Alaska, California, and his home state. Just a few months into his term, Carter’s chief science adviser penned a memo on fossil-fuel carbon emissions and their link to “catastrophic climate change,” the first of its kind. Carter’s environmental dedication also played into his famously chilly relationship with congressional Democrats—as historian and Public Citizens author Paul Sabin put it to me, “The Democratic Party in the 1970s was a more complex political coalition than it is today.”
Still, Carter’s environmental legacy is far more complex than many advocates let on. He was never remembered as a Teddy Roosevelt–style conservationist or even given apt credit as an early global-warming combatant. His legacy, and its missteps, is instructive, especially for understanding our modern-day successes (and unending failures) in confronting the climate crisis.
Carter’s circumstances were unenviable when it came to attempting a green presidency. The multiple energy crises of the 1970s, flamed by foreign warfare and Gulf State hostility, were a nasty shock to an America that had worried little about grid reliability in the postwar years. At first, Carter famously urged the country to limit individual power consumption—turn down the heat, insulate your home, turn off lights and oil lamps, wear a sweater, try carpooling or taking the bus or driving a smaller car—in order to preserve our resources and our environment. From a 1977 energy address: “We will feel mounting pressure to plunder the environment. We’ll have a crash program to build more nuclear plants, strip‐mine and burn more coal, and drill more offshore wells than if we begin to conserve right now.”
Yet Carter also tempered this message (one that had been echoed by his own Republican predecessors) by reassuring citizens that the nation should be a strong, indep