A Green President

“With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly…We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren. We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.”

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a president who had the courage to stand up and say something like this, even at the risk of being unpopular? Wouldn’t it be great if we had a president who would ask Americans to make sacrifices in our personal lives for the greater good?

Actually, we did have a president like this—Jimmy Carter. The above excerpt is taken from a speech he gave on April 17, 1977. In the grips of a energy crisis that was crippling the nation, Carter made energy policy a central focus of his administration. You can read through this speech, or the one he delivered on July 15, 1979. The 1979 speech, famously known as the Crisis of Confidence speech, was given in the wake of the explosion of the energy markets after the Iranian Revolution. This speech was widely seen as a failure at the time.

Looking back today at these speeches, and at his presidency as a whole, one wonders if we may have squandered four years of the first Green President. President Carter was asking us to reexamine our way of life and our habits for the greater good. Carter will always be remembered for famously donning a cardigan and asking Americans to turn down their thermometers, and for installing a solar panel on the roof of the White House. For a long time people laughed at this legacy—but what if we had listened a little more closely?

I am not going to argue that Jimmy Carter was the most effective president, or even a great one. However, his vision and his genuine concern for the direction of his country in relation to our energy policies have a lot of people today asking: Was Jimmy Carter Right? What if his suggestions and concerns continued to exist at the forefront of our nation’s policies, even after he left office?

Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out that way. Despite his best efforts to warn us about the long-term dangers of the energy crisis, Carter lost the election in 1980. There was a small matter of some hostages in Iran. That kinda derailed his whole campaign. Plus, Americans didn’t want to be told to wear cardigans and conserve. Reagan’s message was a lot simpler. And what was one of the first official acts of the Reagan administration? Why, removing the solar panels from the White House roof, of course. I am assuming that, had they been available at the time, Reagan would have also converted his entire fleet of presidential vehicles to Hummers as well.

In hindsight, with our own energy crisis and $4 a gallon gas, maybe it is time to think about what Carter had to say in the ‘70’s. Maybe it wasn’t the most popular thing to tell Americans at the time, but with another election just months away, looking back at these words may provide a valuable lesson to us all.