President Carter and America’s pioneering low-carbon energy legacy

In Dezhou, China, is an odd memorial to an American President. On display is a solar panel, one of three surviving from those famously installed on the White House roof by President Jimmy Carter. President Carter’s death on 29 December, aged 100, is a reminder of the energy path the US could have travelled, and that China did.

President Carter was elected in 1976, with the US two years into an energy crisis, triggered by reductions in oil supply by several major producers, which caused an unimaginable escalation in oil prices. Addressing the nation in a 1977 fireside chat, he wore a cardigan to signal that Americans needed to save energy, by doing more to stay warm inside their own homes. But 1978-9 saw his administration struggle through the Iranian Revolution, which unleashed a further surge in oil prices, and exploded his chances of re-election.

This was symbolic of President Carter’s approach: a mix of far-sightedness, policy errors and political insensitivity to Americans’ mood. He wrongly diagnosed the cause of the 1970s oil shocks as reserves running out. He promoted the use of coal to replace natural gas, where misguided regulations had limited supply.

Encouraging nuclear power

A former nuclear engineer himself, he encouraged nuclear power to replace oil. But he banned reprocessing of nuclear waste, fearing risks of weapons proliferation, and was unlucky to preside over the US’s worst nuclear accident, at Three Mile Island in March 1979. Together with lower energy prices in the 1980s, these issues killed the expansion of nuclear power – a large, mostly reliable, near-zero carbon energy source – in the US.

But, at the same time, he began a process of deregulating energy prices which was later to unleash US gas production. And he promoted energy efficiency and renewables – wind, solar, geothermal and others.

Global warming was not yet a hot-button issue in President Carter’s reign, although he learnt from scientific papers as early as 1971 of the danger of the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide. It would not hit the political highlights until the end of President Ronald Reagan’s time in office, with the June 1988 Senate hearings. Instead, the concern was with more local environmental dangers: smog, toxic waste, pesticides, acid rain and nuclear contamination.

Setting up the Department of Energy

As one of his key legacies, President Carter brought together a bunch of disparate federal agencies to create the Department of Energy. This spent, in real (inflation-corrected) dollars, about $8 billion annually on research and development to the end of his presidency. About half of this went on nuclear power, the rest on a mix of fossil (oil, gas and coal), electricity, energy efficiency and renewable energy. More than $2 billion per year funded renewables.

“By the end of this century [2000], I want our Nation to derive 20% of all the energy we use from the Sun,” President Carter announced at the dedication ceremony for the White House’s solar panels. “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”

Unfortunately, his successor, President Reagan, was a believer in petroleum and free markets more than government action, environmentalism and renewables. He removed the solar water heaters from the White House roof (eventually, President Barack Obama put modern solar panels back). Oil prices fell anyway, as OPEC overplayed its hand in the early 1980s. Energy fell off the priority list, and DOE spending on research and development dropped to barely $2 billion per year until the end of President George W. Bush’s presidency in 2008. In fact, money for renewables had not recovered in real terms to its 1980 level even by 2018.

A pioneer of lithium-ion batteries

And so the US lost its early lead, not just in renewables, but in nuclear power too. Even in 2023, solar and wind accounted for just 15% of its electricity, even less of its total energy, far short of President Carter’s goal for the year 2000. Europe took up the mantle of renewable research, in solar and wind power, but this made little headway until the 2000s. Lithium-ion batteries were developed in the US in the late 1970s, but commercialised only by Sony of Japan in the 1990s. The world lost two decades of progress in low-carbon power.

Now, China dominates the low-carbon energy market. It produces 80% of the world’s solar panels, 79% of lithium-ion batteries, 76% of electric vehicles, and has 60% of wind turbine manufacturing capacity. It is building more new nuclear power than any other country, and is 10 to 15 years ahead of the US in advanced “Generation IV” reactors. And it leads in long-distance ultra-high voltage electricity transmission.

This could have been very different. The US, Europe and Japan might by 2000 have had a massive installed base of nuclear power, a strong contribution of solar and wind, an emerging electric vehicle industry, and an unassailable lead in new energy technologies.

Energy prices would have been higher over this period, with a smaller share of cheap coal and gas, but not disastrously so, and these higher bills would have spurred efficiency. The carbon dioxide build-up would have been much lower, global warming would be less, and we would have much more time and leeway to address remaining emissions without approaching dangerous levels of climate change.

So one of President Carter’s prized solar panels has indeed become, as he feared, a museum piece. Some of his energy policy was visionary; some of it went backwards or made climate change worse. But overall, the US and the West in general missed the chance to build on his environmental legacy, and they and the world are paying for that today.

• Robin M. Mills is CEO of Qamar Energy, and author of The Myth of the Oil Crisis