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 Technicol…