Earth Matters: Jimmy Carter's unheralded green legacy; Antarctica, Greenland could melt 'scary' fast
Jimmy Carter gets much-deserved credit for the humanitarian work he has relentlessly engaged in since leaving the presidency more than four decades ago. His single term in office is not viewed so favorably. Surveys of historians and other scholars over the years have generally ranked his success as president below that of more than half the other 45 men who have held that office. That’s an unfair judgment for many reasons, but most especially when it comes to his environmental record, as Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird notes in his Yale Environment 360 piece on Carter’s green legacy:
Carter’s instincts for conservation had been evident earlier when, as governor of Georgia, he had opposed unbridled commercial development, favored tough regulations to protect the state’s coastal wetlands, and endorsed the creation of two major seashores and river parks.
But when Carter got to the White House, he shocked many observers by appointing James Gustave Speth, age 35, to the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. Speth was regarded by the Washington establishment as a radical on environmental issues. A Yale-trained lawyer and Rhodes Scholar, he had co-founded in 1970 the Natural Resources Defense Council, a tough advocacy group on environmental issues. Speth, who later served as dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, used his position in the administration to educate Carter about the dangers of acid rain, carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere, and the likely extinction of 100,000 species during the next quarter century.
Just before leaving office, Carter released a prophetic report, largely written by Speth, that predicted “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social and agricultural patterns” if humanity continued to rely on fossil fuels. The Global 2000 Report to the President became an early clarion call for scientists studying climate change.
I only met Carter once. It was 1978, and he was touring the Solar Energy Research Institute established under the new Department of Energy. I couldn’t have been hired at SERI’s Solar Law Reporter had Carter not pardoned Vietnam era draft evaders and those of us who went to prison rather than fight a war we viewed as immoral. While SERI’s original mission was focused solely on research and development in solar (and wind) energy, Carter spurred it to also spread the word on existing technologies like passive solar. When President Reagan came into office, he slashed SERI’s budget by 90%, costing most of us our jobs. It wasn’t until President Obama proposed a federal budget more than three decades later that more funding (inflation-adjusted) was included for solar than Carter’s final budget did. SERI was ultimately renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and, with better funding, continues that work today.
While Carter’s push for alternative sources of energy and conservation measures were far-sighted, his energy policies overall were meant to wean the United States off foreign—particularly OPEC—oil to avoid future boycotts that had roiled the economy, not specifically to address climate change, which was barely on any politician’s radar at the time. As such, those policies under the nation’s first comprehensive energy strategy followed the “all-of-the-above” path, with millions of dollars going toward projects like “clean coal” and the creation of synthetic fuels, including subsidies for the extraction and refining of kerogen from the giant oil shale deposits of Colorado and Utah. Fortunately, Exxon’s plan to be producing 8 million barrels a day of petroleum from highly polluting, water-guzzling oil shale by the year 2000 collapsed in the 1980s when oil prices plummeted.
Such matters aside, Carter’s environmental record was outstanding. One of his key successes was protecting 19.6 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980. That required studies of wildlife and an oil and gas assessment of ANWR’s coastal plain, and it mandated that any exploratory oil and gas drilling or production needed Congress to act. Carter also designated 39 new Wild and Scenic Rivers, doubled the size of the National Park System, raised vehicle fuel efficiency standards, and created the Superfund program.
With the 98-year-old Carter now in hospice care, Bird writes:
If environmentalists should remember one thing about the Carter presidency it should be his so-called “malaise speech” in July 1979. It was an extraordinary sermon about America’s limits—a most un-American idea for a people constantly fed on the manna of manifest destiny. “We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own,” he said. “Our people are losing that faith … In a nation that was once proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” Taking a page straight from Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (which Carter had recently read), Carter observed, “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”