Jimmy Carter (RIP): Visionary Undone by Reality
The former president saw the future of energy and climate. The rest of us looked away.
Jimmy Carter died this week, aged 100. Few leaders of the past 50 years did as much to try and grapple with the underlying causes of climate change and imagine a post-fossil-fuel world. As The Heat Will Kill You First author Jeff Goodell put it in Rolling Stone:
He was the Greta Thunberg of the 1970s, saying bold, politically blunt things about greed and consumption and fossil fuel addiction that nobody wanted to hear. And this was all the more remarkable because he was not a Swedish teenager. He was the President of the United States.
But it still wasn’t enough. And we need to reckon with the failure to change course as much as the good intentions. Or we doom ourselves through a lack of imagination.
As with any consequential world leader, opinions about Carter - my own included - went through frequent cycles of change over the years, as reflections on their time in power pass from horse-race coverage to history and they often seem to grow in sepia-toned stature relative to the Technicolor Lilliputians who follow them.
At age 5, I wrote to the president of the United States. Motivated by some admixture of hubris, precocity, and probably spending too many hours in my first years with Sesame Street pre-empted by Watergate hearings. Getting an actual response - in an oversized envelope embossed with the presidential seal and return address of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which I proudly brought into school - made my five year old brain reel from the realisation that these weren’t characters on TV but real people. And this one (I didn’t know about the autopen then) took the time to write something inspirational that actually responded to the letter I’d wrote.
Just a couple of years later, he’d become a punchline, at least in my parents’ house. Sitting with Dad in a Ford Pinto, waiting three hours to fill the tank at a BP station, during another energy crisis is a vivid memory - complete with watching a fistfight of two men who insisted they were next in line for the pump. Later Dad mused that the president should send in a guerrilla force to free the American hostages in Tehran, but that Carter lacked guts. I wondered why a few dozen soldiers disguised in gorilla Halloween costumes holding M16s would fool the Iranians. Only for a disastrous attempt at doing the very thing my father and fellow conservatives like him were demanding to doom his chances for re-election.
Of course, the 39th president did not lack for guts. Or integrity. If Dad had lived long enough to hear the declassified story of how in 1952 the 28-year old Navy Lieutenant James Earl Carter volunteered to help to decontaminate the site of the Chalk River nuclear reactor in Ontario, Canada - the world’s first nuclear “meltdown”. He and 21 others working in small teams for 90-second increments were lowered into the radioactive area, to prevent more damage and more radiation leaking into the surrounding town. His urine set off Geiger counters for months after, and his exposure would now be considered near-fatal.
Carter was one of the first presidents to confront the fossil fuel problem. Many remember his moves to hedge against oil import dependency as response to events, including the imposition of an embargo on oil from Iran. The installation of [thermal, not PV] solar panels on the White House roof - and their later removal under Ronald Reagan - neatly symbolises for many the missed opportunity to confront the threat of climate change when there was still time to prevent some of its worst effects.
In fact, as the New York Times reported in 1978 just a year after Carter took office1. Even as CEOs of big American companies came round to see Carter less as a peanut-farming populist and more of a technophile they could do business with, Big Oil remained the exception2:
The fact that even this exemplary figure failed to achieve anything like the necessary course correction is sobering. And damning. In the popular history of climate we remember NASA scientist James Hansen testifying before Al Gore’s Senate committee in 1988 being a watershed moment after which “we knew”. But I recently came across this memorandum, marked as “THE PRESIDENT HAS SEEN”, dated in July 1977 - the same month I sent my letter to the new president. People, including the president, knew much earlier than many of us could have imagined.
Future generations will find this and documents like it absolutely maddening.
Prepared by White House science advisor Frank Press, a geophysicist, the memorandum is practically a jeremiad: “Release of Fossil CO2 and the Possibility of a Catastrophic Climate Change”.
It outlines in chilling candour the impacts of climate change of up to 5C, triggering by the early 2000s the end of the climatic optimum in which human civilisation became a thing, doing in those decades what normally takes tens of thousands of years of interglacial periods. It singles out worldwide famine due to crop failures as one particular downside. And that the CO2 accumulation would force climate change “within 60 years”. Much like the leaked Exxon internal science from around the same time, the timing turned out to be spookily accurate.
More surprising was that the memo was couched as just reflecting what people already knew:
“As you know this is not a new issue. [emphasis mine] What is new is the growing weight of scientific support which raises the CO2-climate impact from speculation to a serious hypothesis worthy of a response that is neither complacent nor panicky.”
What follows is, in hindsight, heartbreaking:
“The present state of knowledge does not justify emergency action to limit the consumption of fossil fuels in the near term. However, I believe we must now take the potential CO2 hazard into account in developing our long-term energy stragegy [sic].” And calling for something that was the most obviously beneficial civilisational bet in history: “basic research which could lead to breakthroughs for solar electric [PV]”.
We Knew
In my view the hard thing about this is not that a leader failed to convince his followers to go down a path that would avoid the worst effects of climate change. It’s that it would be difficult to imagine a more forthright voice as Jimmy Carter’s, or those in his administration like Press, who were saying EXACTLY what needed to be done. The fault lies not in our star politicians, but at least in part in ourselves.
It’s a fig leaf to hide behind to point to the “does not justify emergency action” language, to argue that he and Carter should have done more, faster. But if Carter has become something of a mythic figure whose obits have bordered on hagiography, Frank Press is a character I understand.
There is something of a poignant coda to the Press memo in his post-Carter Administration career, which is perhaps less defensible - but for some of us more relatable - than the former president’s commitments to efforts like Habitat for Humanity.
Twenty years after Carter’s election, Press co-founded the Washington Advisory Group consultancy. Just a few years later, one of his main clients was the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, specifically the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST), which has received significant funding from Saudi Aramco and attracting attention for the difficulties in reconciling the idea of free enquiry with the policies of the Kingdom3 Press helped plan its design before its opening in 2009.
Press died in 2020, so I can’t ask him how he feels about this. After warning the President of the United States in the 1970s that moving away from fossil fuels was required to avoid catastrophic climate change, but 30 years later making bank from folks who would have done really quite a lot to stop the actions you argued for in the 70s, how do you make sense of those two things?
When even the best of those who came before us fall short of what we might now consider to be complete clarity, we have three options from their example:
Ignore failure to see what, in hindsight, were clear missed opportunities for progress that may not come again.
Hold any failure to do everything right as a reason to condemn. Even if it provides fodder to those who want to discredit past efforts as flawed or hypocritical, in order to deter and delay future action.
Recognise that past leaders were never the villains or vindicators that we might have preferred for a comforting story. To think so is to abdicate our own responsibility to shape what comes next. And to learn from their failures as well as their successes, to do better.
Which is to say, nearly a year BEFORE revolution in Iran took about 7% of world oil supply off the market and caused the price of a barrel of oil (with downstream effects for vehicle and home fuel) doubling during that time.
Fun fact: Carter took office with such a reputation for being anti-Big Oil that he was obliged just two weeks into his term to deny, as reported by the Times, that he might consider nationalising the US energy industry.
Full disclosure: I know several excellent people of integrity and intelligence who work in and with KAUST. And as careful readers will know, before starting this project I worked with Gulf institutions funding climate, energy, and climate tech research from revenues derived from the production of fossil fuel. So I don’t mention this to accuse. I mention it because I recognise that to hold several truths in your head at the same time on this topic IS F*CKING HARD TO DO, but necessary.