Dave Levitan writes:

It’s an old and well-worn story, of course. On June 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter stood in front of 32 newly installed solar panels on the White House roof, and announced a set of recommendations he sent to Congress regarding a grand new solar strategy.

“Today, in directly harnessing the power of the Sun, we’re taking the energy that God gave us, the most renewable energy that we will ever see, and using it to replace our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels,” he said.

Carter’s proposals for a “coordinated government-wide effort” on solar power included spending $1 billion the next fiscal year and sustaining the effort for years to follow. “It will not be a temporary program,” said the president, who died on Sunday at 100. The long-term goal was ambitious: “By the end of this century, I want our nation to derive 20 percent of all the energy we use from the sun.”

Carter’s goals, though in the short term functioning as responses to the ongoing oil crises (not to mention the Three Mile Island accident, just a few months prior), would have doubled as a potentially climate-saving lightning bolt of a change. And this wasn’t entirely an accident — the science on global warming was by then fairly well understood, and reports had started coming into the Oval Office since at least the previous decade, when a 1965 report on “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment” landed on Lyndon Johnson’s desk with recommendations about rising CO2 levels. Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality issued at least three looks at “carbon dioxide pollution.”

The last of those CEQ reports, released the day before Carter ceded the White House to Ronald Reagan, insisted that “the CO2 issue” should be considered a high priority for the government. “The conclusion seems inescapable that the CO2 problem should not be isolated from current debate on long-term energy strategy,” it read. “However, that isolation effectively exists today.” There was a need to examine “alternative global energy futures,” with a particular focus on limiting the expansion of fossil fuel use, and to “accelerate the use of renewable energy sources.”

This did not, of course, happen. Ronald Reagan’s environmental record is, obviously, catastrophic, including drastic funding cuts for Department of Energy renewables research. [Continue reading…]