Jimmy Carter’s environmental legacy during, after presidency: What lessons can we learn?

The news that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter entered hospice care last month prompted considerations of the lifelong Georgian’s term in office and distinguished post-presidential career.

To get a sense of one aspect of the Carter presidency — its environmental legacy — McClatchy spoke to Erik Loomis, a historian of American labor and environmental history and professor at the University of Rhode Island.

By coincidence, Loomis had just been in Georgia the weekend before our interview to visit his brother-in-law, Father Bill McIntyre, pastor of the Saint Peter Claver congregation in Macon.

Q: Jimmy Carter famously put solar panels on the White House. I suspect for most people, if they know anything about Jimmy Carter and the environment, it probably ends there. Can you fill that story in?

A: The 1970s was a period in which environmental issues played a bigger role in our politics and were much more bipartisanly supported, at least in the early ‘70s. And so Carter is kind of operating in a world in which there’s a lot of support for this, at least at first.

When Carter takes the presidency and comes into power in 1977, the U.S. for the first time is really having to think about its energy use. The oil embargo in 1973 and then the related general economic problems of the 1970s really kind of begin to reshape how, or at least have a potential to reshape, the ways in which Americans think about their environment and particularly their energy use.

Think about it — these ‘70s cars were getting, you know, eight, 10 miles a gallon and gas was really cheap. In the postwar consumer suburban world with the freeways and everybody owning cars, nobody really has to think about energy. But with the larger political and geopolitical world of that time, all of a sudden Americans do. And so there’s a big push to get Americans off of foreign energy. And yeah, there maybe were some xenophobic sides to that, but Carter doesn’t really play into that.

He’s wanting to promote renewable energy. The solar panels on the roof of the White House is symbolic, of course, that he himself is going to be an example to Americans on a more sustainable or responsible behavior, which was very much of Carter’s way of thinking about the world. And so he’s promoting ideas and legislation that, for instance, would have gotten the U.S. to 20% renewable energy use by the year 2000.

Well, it’s now 2023 and we’re not at 20% renewable energy. If the nation had listened to Jimmy Carter around these energy issues back in the 1970s, we would be in much better shape for dealing with the climate crisis today. Although he was not necessarily talking about climate change, he was warning us about the use of fossil fuels and other non-renewable energy and was trying to lay the groundwork to transition America onto that.

This gets into the famous speech where he’s giving a talk in the Oval Office and he’s wearing a sweater and he’s telling Americans to turn their thermostats down to 68 degrees or whatever it was. And Americans kind of respond with some ridicule and it doesn’t really help Carter very much, but, you know, he’s right. There’s no question that he was trying to push us off of fossil fuels toward renewable energy and the nation didn’t listen.

Q: He also created the Department of Energy...

A: Right, that is part of a broader attempt to create a national energy policy. In effect there really wasn’t one before. Energy was just something that was mined or drilled and you didn’t really require per se a bigger national policy.

So the idea here was to create a set of policies or to create an agency that would empower the federal government to push for a more holistic energy system and do the things that Cabinet departments can do on these issues.

Q: Can you speak to how his other policies or actions, especially on economic issues, might have had environmental effects?

A: So Carter is a complicated president in terms of evaluating his effectiveness. Some of this is that he’s dealing with, to be fair, relatively difficult economic times. I mean, he’s not responsible for the rise of inflation, the recession after ‘73, the OPEC embargo, all of these things that begin to create the difficulties of the 1970s. That happened at the beginning of the Nixon administration, and Ford is kind of consumed with it.

And so by the time Carter takes over, the U.S. is well into the difficulties of this decade. Carter is sort of of two minds on these things, like around creating the DOE and trying to push for renewables and get this kind of stuff passed — using the power of the federal government to try to envision and create a more sustainable or a more equitable future. And he does that in some other areas, too, including other environmental areas. Land preservation is an example.

But at the same time, his economic policies are so geared toward reducing inflation over any other goal, and Carter sees himself as such a moderate on economic issues, he’s really kind of unable to sort of tie together his more robust environmental policy with his pretty lagging economic policies.

There’s a world out there where possibly a more savvy political president could have united both sides of this equation and moved America, or at least tried to move America, to a revived New Deal coalition and something that’s more sustainable, something that’s looking to fight for economic and environmental justice at the same time. But that’s just not really Jimmy Carter.

Q: You mentioned it briefly but my understanding is that he was also a conservationist.

A: Absolutely, particularly in Alaska. He makes the move to protect large swaths of Alaska from development, creating most of the national monuments and parks that are in Alaska today, and that really vastly increases the size of protected land in the United States. He takes a lot of heat for that from Alaskans who were dedicated to mining and logging and things like that.

But it’s hugely important. And he also signs and promotes the expansion of Redwood National Park in California and to protect many more of the ancient redwoods that are in there. And that also causes a significant sort of localized protest by a timber community.

Carter is sort of promoting a sort of a ‘60s-’70s liberalism on environmental issues, but is perhaps a little bit less attuned to some of the economic struggles in these regions than he could be. But nonetheless, his role in using the power of the federal government to protect large swaths of land has become pretty standard for Democratic presidents now.

Bill Clinton did this, Barack Obama did this. It’s very clear Joe Biden’s going to do this. The creation of large national monuments, particularly in the American West, has been a way for Democratic presidents to establish a legacy on environmental issues. Before Carter, you have to go back to FDR, really, for anybody who promoted it to that level.

Q: In Carter’s vaunted post-presidency, was part of his legacy connected to environmental issues?

A: Interestingly, not as much as you’d think, right? We could ask: did Carter really care that much about the environmental issues per se, or did he see it as a political benefit when he was a president, and in his post-presidency worked on the issues that he cared about the most? Al Gore, for instance, in his post-political life has been much more active in promoting issues around climate change than Carter ever was.

Carter is, to an extent — in terms of public health issues, which should be considered environmental issues. He was good on those issues when he was president, cleaning up Love Canal, creating Superfund, creating an OSHA that was actually a functional agency for really the only time in its half a century or more now.

That does extend to the post-presidency around issues of his work on disease and trying to eliminate river blindness and guinea worm and the other horrible tropical diseases that he’s dedicating so much energy to try to eliminate from the planet. I think, properly seen, that is an environmental issue. I don’t think that most Americans conceptualize it as one.

But in terms of energy or conservation, those were not huge parts of his post-presidential world, although I don’t think he has to apologize for that, given all the other positive things that he did.

Q: Would you say that his presidency and the actions that he took present any sort of political lessons for the environmental movement or for environmental politics today?

A: That’s a good question. If there’s a lesson from the Carter administration, I think it’s that, as a movement, you have to keep organizing and not assume that the political situation is going to remain favorable to you.

Carter kind of represents a peak in some ways of the environmental movement’s influence in American politics, or at least it’s during the peak. But really once Reagan takes power, the wind shifts so radically, so dramatically, the environmental movement’s caught flat-footed.

You can hope and push for a strong environmental president — Carter certainly was that — but there’s certainly no guarantee that’s going to continue. So the kind of political strategies that the environmental movement has used to promote government investment really have to be combined with more grassroots organizing and really engaging local people on environmental issues, because the political winds are not always going to be favorable. And certainly the post-Carter world, under both Reagan and Bush, was tremendously negative for environmentalists.

Q: I can’t help drawing some parallels to the present in terms of, we have a president who has done some environmental legislation, but also how durable is that?

A: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we can say, you know, probably not very durable, and may not even last his own administration because of the Supreme Court. So these are issues we have to face.