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‘NOBODY CAN EMBARGO SUNLIGHT’: JIMMY CARTER AND THE US SOLAR
REVOLUTION THAT WASN’T  
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Bill McKibben
January 7, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ Why didn't we listen? We could so easily have listened. _

Jimmy Carter speaking in front of Solar Panels on White House U.S.
President Jimmy Carter speaking in front of Solar Panels placed on
West Wing Roof of White House, announcing his solar energy policy,
Washington, DC, USA, Warren K. Leffler, June 20, 1979., Photo by:
Universal History

 

As Jimmy Carter [[link removed]] is
laid to rest this week, I think it’s worth paying attention to just
exactly how out front he was on solar energy.

Driven by both the upheaval of the OPEC embargoes and the lingering
echoes of Earth Day at the start of the 1970s, and with “Limits to
Growth” and “Small is Beautiful” as two of the decade’s big
bestsellers (Carter had a reception for E.F. Schumacher at the White
House!), the administration decided that solar was the way out. (The
idea of the greenhouse effect was beginning to be talked about in
these circles too, but it wasn’t yet a public idea, and it wasn’t
driving policy).

Everyone knows about the solar panels on the White House roof, but
that was the least of it. Jimmy Carter, in his 1980 budget, pledged
truly serious cash for solar research, and for building out panels on
roofs across America. “Nobody can embargo sunlight,” he said in
his most important speech, from the government’s mountaintop solar
energy lab in Golden, Colorado. “No cartel controls the sun. Its
energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not
poison our waters.” Carter—with characteristic bad luck—was
giving this speech outside in a driving rainstorm, not the backdrop
his handlers had hoped for. But he was resolute. “The question is no
longer whether solar energy works,” he said. “We know it works.
The only question is how to cut costs.”

Reagan took the solar panels off the White House, but again that was
the least of it.

His goal, he said, was to have America getting a quarter of its power
from the sun by the year 2000. And that was almost certainly an
achievable goal—the history of it is that when you pour money on
panels, they get better and cheaper fast. The money finally came from
Germany, with its feed-in tariffs, which subsidized the development of
low-cost Chinese panel manufacturing beginning around 2005. But that
was a quarter century after what might have been, had we listened to
Carter.

Just for kicks, here’s John Hall and Carly Simon singing about the
“warm power of the sun” outside the Capitol in 1979. (If you look
really closely, you can’t see me, but I was there). I think the
movement probably made a mistake spending as much time opposing
nuclear as backing solar—but opposing is easier, it must be said.

Anyway, of course, we listened to Reagan, with _his_ siren song about
‘morning in America,’ and his version of ‘drill baby drill,’
and we went ever deeper down into the hydrocarbon hell we now inhabit.
Reagan took the solar panels off the White House, but again that was
the least of it. The real problem was that he slashed federal research
funding to the bone. Tens of thousands of people in the nascent solar
industry lost their jobs; a generation disappeared.

In fact, it’s only now that we’re getting back to where we were.
The Inflation Reduction Act will forever be Biden’s signal
achievement, even if he and Harris never figured out how to talk about
it (and didn’t even really try during the fall campaign). But it’s
done what Carter envisioned—jumpstarted the future. And if you want
a musical tribute (not quite John Hall and Carly Simon, but pretty
good anyway), check out this video about the DOE’s Loan Program
Office, which—under the inspired leadership of Jigar Shah—has been
at the absolute center of the IRA rollout:LPO song on IRA rollout

Now, of course, the Trump administration is going to try and do what
the Reagan administration did in the 1980s—slow down the transition
to clean energy, at the behest of their friends in Big Oil. Trump’s
a true believer—he told
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the British government last week that they should take down the wind
turbines in the North Sea and drill for more oil instead. Biden got
the final word here, though—in one of his last acts
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he put an awful lot of the U.S. coast off-limits to drilling and in
ways that won’t be easy for the next guys to undo.

The administration will still do serious damage, of course, but it’s
possible that it won’t be as fatal as the last time around. For one,
the energy revolution is now global, and so even if the U.S. lags,
China will drive the planet forward. For another, the IRA has two
years under its belt already, and so there’s lots of money already
out there, lots of it in unusual places. (The biggest solar panel
factory in the western hemisphere is in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s
district). The GOP has announced they’d like to cut $700 billion in
clean energy funding to help pay for a $5 trillion tax cut—we’ll
see how the politics shakes out.

The GOP has announced they’d like to cut $700 billion in clean
energy funding to help pay for a $5 trillion tax cut—we’ll see how
the politics shakes out.

But the biggest reason is that the movement of people who care about
the future know what happened last time, and we will do our best. Some
of that will mean trying to keep IRA money funding through the
Republican Congress; much of it will mean figuring out how to
celebrate sun and windpower, and make them ever easier to install at
the state, local, and street level. That’s much of what we’ll be
working on at this newsletter in the year ahead—for now, I’ll just
tell you to keep the weekend of the autumnal equinox (Sept 21) free on
your calendar.

And also just a reminder, as the press reports on the funeral of the
pious and extremely good Baptist peanut farmer (all of which is true)
that the 70s were also kind of cool. I mean, Carly Simon! And that
White House roof, where the solar panels were? That’s where Willie
Nelson smoked a large joint
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after an Oval Office visit. Jimmy, we will miss you—you were a great
ex-president, but a great president too. If only we’d listened.

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Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury
College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent
book is "Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?." He
also authored "The End of Nature," "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough
New Planet," and "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the
Durable Future."

* Jimmy Carter; Solar Panels; Clean Energy;
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