And Carter was paying the price: his approval rating was 28 percent, the lowest of his presidency.
On that summer day, Carter acknowledged that some few Americans have reached a state of panic.
Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protection Agency and the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
Former President Jimmy Carter speaking in front of the solar panels placed on the roof of the White House, announcing his solar energy policy on June 20, 1979.Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Barack Obama launched the Clean Power Plan and signed the Paris Climate Agreement.
Joe Bidens Inflation Reduction Act will funnel $370 billion into climate and energy projects over the next decade.
The challenge facing this country is the moral equivalent of war, Carter said in 1979.
But it hardly mattered.
And this was all the more remarkable because he was not a Swedish teenager.
He was the President of the United States.
Carter grew up barefootand poor on a farm in southwestern Georgia.
The farm had no electricity or running water, no diesel-fueled tractors, and of course no air-conditioning.
He sweated in the fields with the other farmhands and felt the red dirt between his toes.
But Carter was also a pragmatist.
Act LocallyWill Biden Pardon This Human Rights Lawyer Who Beat Big Oil in Court?
Act Locally
Will Biden Pardon This Human Rights Lawyer Who Beat Big Oil in Court?
As gas stations shut down in the 1970s and prices spiraled, Americans were at once terrified and angry.
How much of an environmental motivation he had for his actions is tough to say.
But does that matter?
Whatever Carters motivation may have been, his record on energy and environmental issues is clear.
PURPA also encouraged small power production facilities, primarily cogeneration and hydro.
None of this came without a fight.
Carters energy and environmental legacy is not unblemished or uncontroversial.
He stopped the plutonium economy before it could get started, Speth argues.
Thats had huge greenhouse gas and air pollution consequences that still live with us today, Webber says.
On climate, Carter understood the threat of rising CO2 pollution as well as any scientist of his time.
Other politicians played golf Carter played tennis but he was reading scientific journals.
Thats how he got his jollies.
By the time Carter took office, the risks of climate change were becoming well-documented throughout the federal government.
If he had won a second term, would he have sounded the climate alarm?
But its hard to imagine that Carter would not have pushed global warming forward as a major issue.
If that had happened, we could be getting out of the fossil fuel business right now.
But, of course, thats not what happened.
What happened was Ronald Reagan.
Carter had imaged that by 2020, America would be creating 20 percent of its electricity from the sun.
If you consider historical emissions, the U.S. is by far thelargest contributorto the climate crisis.
And without U.S. leadership, the climate crisis has only accelerated.
Carter himself never gave up the fight.
Carter did his part, both as president and as a citizen.
Its not too late for us to do ours.
