Former President Jimmy Carter “inaugurated the nation’s investment in research on solar energy and was one of the first presidents to warn us about the dangers of climate change,” Carter biographer Kai Bird writes in an op-ed.
Back in the late 1970s, the White House was harvesting the power of the sun via solar panels. The country was also deep in the throes of global energy and inflation crises — sound familiar?
The solar panels installed on the White House in the 1970s may be long gone, but the current occupant, President Joe Biden, like Carter a Democrat, has also leveraged the notion of U.S.-made protection from foreign energy reliance to push energy and climate-change policy. In what some have deemed the largest climate-change-focused legislation ever, Biden used last year’s Inflation Reduction Act to push for at-scale solar, wind ICLN, -1.
A bipartisan past: Nixon’s EPA and Carter’s solar push On installation day in 1979, Carter made this prediction, according to an article in Scientific American: “In the year 2000, this solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy.
Nixon, who can be credited with creating the Environmental Protection Agency , later signed the clean air and clean water acts into law. By 1986, the Reagan administration had also dismantled the White House solar panel installation while resurfacing the roof.“Hey! That system is working. Why don’t you keep it?” mechanical engineer Fred Morse recalled thinking, according to the Scientific American article. Morse, now of Abengoa Solar, had helped install the panels as director of the solar energy program during the Carter years and then watched as they were dismantled during his tenure in the same job under Reagan.
A presidency reconsidered? Carter’s environmental activism will be debated as his long life is recalled. He regulated natural gas, which has come to power much of the U.S. electrical grid in recent decades. Although much cleaner than coal, natural gas is still a polluting source of energy.
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