Grasslands: When Jimmy Carter chose brand models for his political campaign, he passed on the regular red, white and blue. He wanted clean.
The color became a constant reminder of how much the Georgia Democrat valued nature and placed climate protection first. On keys, bumper stickers, posters, the signal rechristening the old Plains train station as his campaign office. Perhaps the local Election Night celebration.
” The moment it was announced, we all had the tops to put on- and they were clean, too”, said LeAnne Smith, Carter’s daughter, recalling the 1976 success party.
Almost a half-century later, environmental activists are remembering Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100, as a leader who elevated economic management, energy conservation and debate about the worldwide threat of increasing carbon dioxide levels.
In a similar vein to how President Ronald Reagan dismantled the solar panel Carter installed on the White House ceiling, President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to leave the clean energy investments that President Joe Biden included in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Putting off politics, there is now a scientific consensus that Carter should have been more like two generations before.
The Natural Resources Defense Council’s leader, Manish Bapna, said,” President Carter was four centuries ahead of his time.” Prior to the introduction of” weather change,” he claimed, Carter called for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Setting standards and wearing blouses Former Vice President Al Gore referred to Carter as” a longtime role model for the entire economic motion,” whose campaigning for climate change earned him the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Carter established the first domestic appliance and passenger vehicle efficiency standards in his term as president. He established the US Department of Energy, which simplified energy research and increased the Wilderness Area’s protection by more than two ten percent.
Carter, who received mockery, urged Americans to make personal sacrifices in response to the world’s growing fuel shortages, including driving less and turning down the thermostat in the winter. He advocated for renewable energy to lessen its dependence on fossil fuels, calling for 20 % of US energy to be produced alternatively by 2000.
But there are still lingering grievances about what the 39th president attempted or failed to accomplish before losing overwhelmingly to Ronald Reagan.
Addressing climate change, Carter resigned from office in 1981 shortly after receiving a report from the West Wing that claimed fossil fuels were contributing to rising carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere. Top environmentalists at Carter’s request “immediate” cuts to fossil fuel burning to stop what scientists at the time referred to as” carbon dioxide pollution.”
Before Carter, biographer Jonathan Alter said, “nobody anywhere in the world in a high government position was talking about this problem.”
The New York Times published its article on the 13th page of its front section after The White House released the findings, which drew forgettable news coverage. Beyond the energy legislation he had already signed, Carter had little time to make in his place.
The report recommended limiting global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius ( 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit ) above preindustrial levels. Thirty-five years later, in the 2015 Paris climate accords, participating nations set a similar goal.
It’s fair to say that we would have begun addressing climate change in the early 1980s if he had been reelected, according to Alter, who spoke to the AP. ” When you think about that, it adds a kind of a tragic dimension, almost, to his political defeat”.
Reagan ended high-level conversations about carbon emissions. He criticized efficiency standards because the government overreacted and rescinded some rules. His chief of staff, Don Regan, called the solar panels” a joke”.
promoting energy independence Despite Carter’s emphasis on renewable energy sources, the fossil fuel industry benefited from his efforts to achieve US energy independence.
CollinO’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Foundation, pointed to coal-fired power plants built during and shortly thereafter Carter’s term, and his deregulation of natural gas production, a moveO’Mara called” a precursor” to widespread fracking. According to Babpna, Carter supported drilling off the coasts of Long Island, New York, and New England.
Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, pointed to Carter’s Synthetic Fuels Corporation, a short-lived effort to produce fossil fuel alternatives that “would have meant much higher carbon emissions”.
But Carter had the right priorities, especially on research and development coordinated through the Energy Department, Nadel said. He made it possible for us to use a national approach rather than relying on one company here and another there.
Stewarding God’s creation Carter’s environmental interests date back to a rural boyhood that included fishing, hunting, and working his father’s farmland.
Dubose Porter, a long-time Georgia Democratic Party leader, said,” Jimmy Carter was an environmentalist before it was a real part of the political discussion. I’m not talking about solar panels on the White House.” Just focusing on that misses how committed and early he was, he said.
Porter said Carter’s early years served as governor because of his support for Georgia’s state parks system and opposition to Georgia’s governors who wanted to dam a river. Carter decided to override the lucrative federal construction proposal by paddling the waterway himself.
Carter fought back and forth in Washington on issues he thought were harmful and unnecessary. More than 150 million acres (60.7 million hectares ) of federal protection, including redwood forests in California and vast swaths of Alaska, were expanded by him.
Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth College professor who has written on Carter’s faith, said he saw himself as a custodian of divinely granted natural resources.
” That’s a real connection that young evangelicals still have with him today”, Balmer said.
Carter criticized consumerism, saying that because he won the presidency amid energy shortages rooted in global conflict, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East, national security and economic interests matched Carter’s religious beliefs and love of nature, Nadel noted.
As inflation and gas lines grew, Carter called for individual sacrifice and sweeping action on renewable energy. He compared the energy crisis to” the moral equivalent of war.”
Carter remarked in 1979 that “human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” However, we’ve come to the conclusion that having things and consuming them do not satisfy our search for meaning.
In presidential politics, that “malaise” speech, which condemned unchecked American consumerism, was dubbed that by the media despite Carter not using the word. More than 100 million Americans watched Carter’s celebration. Carter acknowledged that his speech was a failure in his annotated” White House Diary” by the year 2010 and claimed it was prescient in favor of bold and direct energy decisions.
The Carter presidency still has a positive impact, according to Washington Governor. Jay Inslee, whose 2020 presidential run focused on climate action. ” I’ve learned in politics that serendipity is everything and timing is everything.
