So much has been said and written about Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and winner, in 2002, of the Nobel Peace Prize. As he celebrated his 99th birthday last weekend, there is still more to learn about him.
The old news is to talk about the problems during the Carter presidency — primarily the Iran hostage crisis and the oil crisis that doomed his chances of re-election. Less known is how Carter waged a campaign against climate change decades before it became a hot political crisis.
As a nuclear scientist by training, Carter understood the risks that pollutants posed to the environment. He came into office and immediately acted. He had solar panels installed on the White House — some three dozen — which the next president, Ronald Reagan, promptly had removed.
Carter wanted experts to tell him about threats to the environment; a key warning on climate change came shortly after he became president, reinforcing Carter’s concerns. The report, from Carter’s chief scientific adviser and head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Frank Press, underscored the “greenhouse effect” of fossil fuels in the atmosphere and its potential to induce a global warming climate crisis.
By the end of his first year in office, Carter had commissioned a series of reports on the environmental risks of global warming — the first American president to recognize the problem of climate change.
One of those reports, “Global 2000 Report to the President,” flagged the warming of the planet as a threat to sustainable development. It concluded that the United States needed to limit the world’s average temperature to 2 degrees Celsius. (This was close to 40 years before the United Nations reached an identical conclusion in the Paris Agreement.)
Testifying before Congress following the release of that report was one of its primary authors, James Gustave (Gus) Speth, who co-founded the National Resources Defense Council. Speth headed President Carter’s task force on the environment. He explained the global stresses on renewable natural resources and the critical importance of conserving them, warning that the next 20 years (meaning 1980-2000) would see an increasingly crowded world with diminishing supplies of things like water and fish.
Speth made clear to the members that day that the world was not destined to live with climate change if America and other nations could get ahead of the problem. “We revive these findings not as predictions of what will occur,” he testified, “but as projections as what could occur if we and other nations do not respond.”
Looking back, it is clear that Jimmy Carter and his aides were warning America about a future climate disaster. As Carter said in a speech to the nation, the “principle is that we must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems—wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both problems at once.”
Carter was never rewarded for his climate warnings.
In a 2020 biography of Jimmy Carter, scholar Jonathan Alter writes about how climate change permeated the former president’s thinking and became a topic of debate in the presidential contest between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan over four decades ago.
Reagan had been quoted as saying that more than 80 percent of nitrogen oxide air pollution was caused by trees and vegetation. Carter believed otherwise, having studied the impact of human beings on climate years before that debate. But the public didn’t really care at that point in history about the warming of the planet.
With the benefit of hindsight, one wonders if we would be in a different climate situation today had Jimmy Carter’s warnings been heeded. Reagan had a landslide victory over Carter in 1980 and the issue of climate change was sidelined. Any legislation or executive orders on global warming were put on ice for years to come.
Each day the impact of climate change seems to grow, the most recent being the deadly rains in New York, where an unprecedented state of emergency was declared last week.
It is not too late the heed the warnings of our former president and get serious about climate, in what would be the ultimate birthday present.
Tara D. Sonenshine is a former U.S. undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and currently teaches at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.