“We must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.”
- President Jimmy Carter, address to the nation announcing a new national renewable energy plan, 1977
A memo dating back to the days when Jimmy Carter was in the White House is making news suddenly. It is a rather stunning memo, because it seemingly accurately predicts some serious problems with climate change for the future, which have actually come to pass since.
What specifically came true? Well, here's part of the memo:
Fossil fuel combustion has increased at an exponential rate over the last 100 years. As a result, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is now 12 percent above the pre-industrial revolution level and may grow to 1.5 to 2.0 times that level within 60 years. Because of the “greenhouse effect” of atmospheric CO2 the increased concentration will induce a global climatic warming of anywhere from 0.5 to 5°C.
That one was accurate. It was not the only one that was accurate:
The potential effect on the environment of a climatic fluctuation of such rapidity could be catastrophic and calls for an impact assessment of unprecedented importance and difficulty. A rapid climatic change may result in large scale crop failures at a time when an increased world population taxes agriculture to the limits of productivity.
And still more:
The urgency of the problem derives from our inability to shift rapidly to non-fossil fuel sources once the climatic effects become evident not long after the year 2000; the situation could grow out of control before alternate energy sources and other remedial actions become effective.
Yet, all of this was not a new revelation to everyone. People were aware of climate change since back in the 1950's and 1960's, although it was not such widespread knowledge back then. What was changing during the days of the Carter administration, however, was the abundance of scientific evidence that supported the truth of climate change:
As you know this is not a new issue. 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.
However, urgent action on an executive level was not taken following this memo. Why? Because when Press’s memo made it to President Carter’s desk, James “Jim” Schlesinger, America’s first secretary of energy, made his own note in response to all of this:
My view is that the policy implications of this issue are still too uncertain to warrant Presidential involvement and policy initiatives.
Not everyone was so blasé about it. Carter's White House Domestic Affairs Advisor Stu Eizenstat was deeply affected by the contents of the memo, considering it a "transformational moment." It helped to get him far more involved in work on climate change in the future "including his decision in 1997 to serve as the United States’s principal negotiator for the Kyoto global warming protocols."
Yet, he explains why more official actions by the Carter administration were not taken when the opportunity was present to perhaps do so:
“We realized our dependence on foreign oil was dangerous and, very importantly, alternative energy was in its infancy,” Eizenstat said. “So Carter was both doing conservation and still encouraging more domestic oil and gas as a way of reducing dependence on foreign oil,” said Eizenstat. “As with all policy, you have conflicting goals.”
The more I have researched the Carter years, and the man and his presidency, the more I feel the United States missed some serious opportunities to prepare for a better, more promising future. These days, it seems very common to hear people talking about every new election as "the biggest in our lifetime." However, to my mind's eye, perhaps the biggest and most consequent election in actuality during my own lifetime (even though I was far too young to realize or even understand it at the time) was the 1980 election. The country seemed to face a very serious choice then. It was a question of style over substance, and that is what the country elected, by a landslide. All of the problems and political trends that we have seen since, it feels, all seem to have their roots with that one election, and the political rise of the wildly popular Ronald Reagan, who's polished image as most people's apparently ideal president outweighed the reality that his actual polices were in fact detrimental to the country. One of the first things that Reagan did was take down the solar panels that President Carter had installed atop the White House. Reagan also got the ball rolling with popular perceptions of the evils of big government, even though the reality was that government grew during his years in the White House. Reagan also weakened environmental standards, weakened unions, and greatly inflated the military budget. The national debt and budget deficit soared. Wages and benefits stagnated in a very real sense. Yet, the perception that most people had was that the wave of patriotism and flag-waving made the country feel stronger and better, which allowed them to get past the uncertainty of the turbulence of the sixties and seventies, and perhaps particularly of the Vietnam conflict.
Had the country given Carter a real chance, and if he had actually gone ahead as planned with making the country more energy independent, I feel that the United States would be in much stronger position today. Perhaps we would not have gotten involved in some of the costly (in every sense of that word) wars that we involved ourselves in during the decades since. Perhaps our dependence on oil would have been significantly less, had we actually listened to what he and his administration were warning us about back then. But Reagan seemed to epitomize a success story, having been a Hollywood celebrity. He sure acted the part of the kind of a leader that most Americans wanted to believe in. Also, he had a nice smile, I was told repeatedly by people back then when asked why they liked Reagan so much. The trend of pretty politicians with no real substance telling people pretty lies might not have began with Reagan, but it sure seemed to get so popular as to define American politics, then and ever since. Reagan made future leaders like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush possible. And the Clintons and the Bushes made Trump possible. Who knows what Trump will make possible for future leaders of this nation. But it sometimes feels like everything that we are seeing and facing was made possible by our national decision back in 1980. That was the first step down, and it made every step down since not only more possible, but frankly, more inevitable.
We have been following those steps downward ever since.
Below is the link to the Guardian article about this story, which provides further detail on the memo and the circumstances surrounding it:
The 1977 White House climate memo that should have changed the world by Emma Pattee of The Guardian, 14 June, 2022:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/14/1977-us-presidential-memo-predicted-climate-change
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