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+--- Thread: Article Jimmy Carter might have saved the climate, if the country had let him try? (/thread-17089.html)
Jimmy Carter might have saved the climate, if the country had let him try? - C C - Dec 31, 2024
https://www.splinter.com/jimmy-carter-might-have-saved-the-climate-if-the-country-had-let-him-try
EXCERPTS: 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...
[...] 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.”
[...] 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 ... 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...
[...] 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 [...] 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... (MORE - missing details)