President Jimmy Carter at the White House in March 1977. (Library of Congress/Marion S. Trikosko/Handout via REUTERS) ·Handout . / reuters
Jimmy Carter’s one term in the White House left varied imprints, from US relationships in the Middle East to how we think about inflation, but one of the 39th president’s most lasting legacies is likely on how we consume power.
On one hand, Carter remains a hero to environmentalists after he became one of the first presidents to consider climate change, moved to protect vast swaths of Alaska’s wilderness, and use the government’s power to kickstart the creation of the solar sector.
But the Democratic politician also championed fossil fuels. He pushed for energy deregulation and helped spur increased coal and oil production. He also helped create the framework for the natural gas boom that followed his time in office.
“It was a mixed time,” notes Jay Hakes, an energy historian and former director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.
President Jimmy Carter speaks in front of solar panels placed on roof of White House in 1979. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) ·Universal History Archive via Getty Images
Carter signed both the National Energy Act of 1978 and the Energy Security Act of 1980: two laws that historians say are key moments in U.S. energy history. The laws, among other things, reoriented the government’s relationship with the energy industry with provisions that deregulated the sale of natural gas, encouraged energy transport across the country, and spurred the use of non-fossil fuels.
Carter also signed a windfall profit tax on oil companies that earned him the enmity of generations of oil executives. But even that had a mixed legacy. As Hakes notes “some of that money was used to develop fracking technology” while, at the same time “a lot went to solar.”
Soon after taking office, Carter delivered a televised speech where he declared the energy crisis the “moral equivalent of war.” His actions in the following months included doing pretty much everything he could do to encourage clean energy, including famously installing solar panels at the White House.
“He was a genuine environmentalist,” adds Kai Bird, the author of a biography of Carter called The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. Bird explained that Carter’s environmental focus goes all the way back to his time as Governor of Georgia and his time working the land as a peanut farmer. While in office, Carter not only funded solar research but he also appointed climate activists to prominent positions at the EPA and other agencies.
Those appointees were often suggested to Carter by an auspicious source: Ralph Nader. The famed left-wing activist had a connection with Carter forged in the 1970s including during softball games in Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia.
Nader took the role of umpire and is seen in pictures calling balls and strikes while wearing a business suit. Bird noted in a recent interview that he bumped in to Nader a few years back saying the the famous activist felt “we didn’t realize what a window of opportunity we had in Jimmy Carter.”
Jimmy Carter at bat in 1976 during a softball game at Plains High School. The umpire is consumer advocate and future five-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader. (Ken Hawkins/Alamy Stock Photo) ·Alamy Stock Photo
Hakes also notes that various bills that Carter signed into law supercharged solar efforts at the Department of Energy — an agency that was also formed during Carter’s term — and “I would say it’s given us at least 10 years on climate change.”
The energy policies enacted by Carter also shaped the fossil fuel industry where he was far from a purely green president by today standards.
During Carter’s time in office, the government and industry were wrestling with twin oil crises at the time. In 1973 there was the Arab oil embargo followed by an energy crisis linked to the Iranian revolution in 1979, while Carter was in office.
The U.S. response to the threat was an “all of the above” energy approach that began under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford but was largely enacted by Carter. The moves set the stage for greater U.S. energy development, particularly in natural gas, and cut America’s crude oil imports in half between 1979 and 1983.
Carter “gradually decontrolled the price of natural gas and that would eventually lead to our fracking industry, which led to energy independence” said Bird.
A line of cars at a gas station in San Francisco in May 1979. (Janet Fries/Getty Images) ·Janet Fries via Getty Images
Carter also advocated an approach to energy that included the development of dirtier forms of energy like coal.
During his final State of the Union, he called on America to “rely on and encourage multiple forms of energy production” listing coal, crude oil, natural gas, solar, nuclear, and synthetic fuels as options and adding “the framework put in place over the last four years will enable us to do this.”
Perhaps most emblematic of Carter’s nuanced energy legacy is in Alaska where he protected more than 150 million acres of land from development which made him a hero to environmentalists. But Carter also opened the door, via a 1980 law, to drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
That latter move kicked off the decades-long fight over that wilderness which continues to this day.
Carter and energy conservation: A ‘rather sad part of the story’
Carter also often focused on efforts to get Americans to practice energy conservation.
He became synonymous with a sweater he wore in an address to the nation just weeks after taking office. The move was actually an attempt to invoke Franklin D. Roosevelt rather than make a comment on energy, but the image became a widely noted — and mocked by his political opponents — as a shorthand for his approach.
Carter’s legacy in this regard was short-lived.
Hakes recently recalled a telling moment during his time at the Energy Department in the 1990s under then-President Bill Clinton. During a senior staff meeting, he says when he used the term conservation (a Carter favorite) “and I was corrected: we don’t use that word, we say, ‘efficiency'” he said he was told.
“I think this is the rather sad part of the story,” he added about this aspect of Carter’s energy legacy .
Indeed, presidential calls for Americans to sacrifice — a common refrain from Carter as well as his predecessors — has not been repeated in recent decades. Carter’s famous “malaise” speech included calls for limits in what Americans should consume but has become a shorthand for presidential failure.
“No politician since, and certainly not Biden, has given a speech like that,” noted Bird. “It was all about limits.”
It’s a major loss for the country, Hakes contends, noting that American conservation efforts in the 1970s were strikingly successful. The 50% drop in oil imports following Carter’s term was driven, he says, not as much by increased production as by widespread conservation efforts.
President Jimmy Carter delivers his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980. Behind him are Vice President Walter Mondale and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. (Arnie Sachs/CNP/Getty Images) ·Consolidated News Pictures via Getty Images
As Carter himself put it during his farewell address “we live in a time of transition, an uneasy era which is likely to endure for the rest of this century” correctly adding a prediction that competition for scarce energy resources would be a theme that long outlived his time in Washington.
Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
