In reflecting on Jimmy Carter’s death, my mind skipped to the Apple TV+ streaming series “For All Mankind,” an alternate reality drama that imagines how the world might have been if it was the Soviets, not the Americans, who walked on the moon first during the Cold War space race.
The alternate reality I’d like to write is in honor of Carter: How would the world have been different had President Ronald Reagan not removed the solar panels that Carter had installed on the White House roof during his presidency with the aim of kick-starting the solar industry and inspiring Americans to adopt clean energy in the wake of the 1970s oil crisis and gas lines?
Carter and his family personally used those very basic solar panels. Roughly three yards long and one yard wide, they absorbed the sun’s rays and powered a water heater for their living quarters and the White House cafeteria.
Yes, Carter had his share of missteps, but he was way, way, way ahead of his time on clean energy. The man had a much richer imagination when it came to energy than he gets credit for. He was about a lot more than lowering the thermostat and hinting that Americans should put on a sweater.
In my alternate reality — let’s call it “Chasing the Sun for All Mankind” — Reagan, instead of ordering Carter’s crude solar panels to be removed in 1986, would have doubled down on solar power. He would have ordered every U.S. government building to install advanced photovoltaic solar cells on their roofs, because PV solar cells were increasingly commercially viable in the 1980s and could convert the sun’s rays into an electric current. As a result, America would have become the Saudi Arabia of solar panels.
Oh, my goodness, how the world might have been different.
We could have improved photovoltaic technology faster and driven the price of solar cell panels down the cost-volume curve faster, so that by today, most every building and home in America could be solar powered, every poor country would have been able to afford solar energy, we never would have fought another war for oil, and climate change would have been slowed — and Carter and Reagan would have been chiseled into Mount Rushmore as the co-fathers of American energy independence.
It didn’t happen that way, but not because Carter didn’t try. In a delightful 2010 essay in Scientific American, David Biello wrote a sun-warmed remembrance of Carter’s solar pioneering:
“On June 20, 1979, the Carter administration installed 32 panels designed to harvest the sun’s rays and use them to heat water. Here is what Carter predicted at the dedication ceremony: ‘In the year 2000 this solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy. … 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.’”
Carter’s predictions were both right and wrong. The next generation of solar innovation based on photovoltaic solar cells has indeed become one the cheapest forms of clean energy on Earth, but it took some 40 years, not 20, to get there. We might have reached that milestone earlier had Carter’s successors shared his vision and perseverance. Alas, they did not, so Carter’s White House solar panels today are also a symbol — not so much of a road not taken but of a road not taken fast enough in America.
By the way, Carter was also right that his panels could end up one day in a museum. But he could never have anticipated it would be in a museum in China, which did take the solar road — fast.
As Biello noted, after Reagan took down the panels in 1986, one of the 32 was saved and now resides at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, one is at the Carter Library, and one — you can’t make this up — joined “the collection of the Solar Science and Technology Museum in Dezhou, China. Huang Ming, chairman of Himin Solar Energy Group Co., the largest manufacturer of such solar hot water heaters in the world, accepted the donation for permanent display there on Aug. 5.”
Reagan may not have been listening to Carter, but Beijing was. Chinese-made photovoltaic solar panels are anything but museum pieces in today’s China. China today controls roughly 80 percent of the world’s PV solar panel supply chain — and it is building almost double the solar capacity of the E.U. and more than triple that of the U.S. Unlike America, China made a decades-long, state-funded commitment to dominate the solar industry. China did not have a renewable energy policy that changed every four or eight years, as we saw with the transitions from Carter to Reagan and from President Barack Obama to President Donald Trump — and now President Joe Biden back to President-elect Trump. Such silliness.
Carter had set a visionary goal in 1979 that America would derive 20 percent of U.S. energy needs from renewable sources by the year 2000. After roughly twice that amount of time, renewables are indeed now 20 percent of American electricity generation, but a lot of that is wind and hydro. Solar accounts for roughly four percent of total U.S. electricity generation.
One reason is that Reagan turned away from solar and emphasized exploitation of our cheap fossil fuels instead. “By 1986,” Biello noted, “the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (D.O.E.) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies — recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers.” Again, it was that year that the Reagan team quietly took down the Carter solar panels while resurfacing the White House roof.
It always takes patience to bring a president’s true legacy into focus. For 20 years after Carter’s presidency, his White House solar panels were viewed by many as white elephants — symbols of a naïve, excessively liberal, starry-eyed president. But 20 years after those first 20 years, Carter’s vision of a renewably powered America seems incredibly forward thinking — the necessary foundation for a more economically secure, environmentally secure and geopolitically secure America.
As it happens, Reagan’s energy legacy is also complex in retrospect. By doubling down on fossil fuels — while also spurring Saudi Arabia to pump more oil — Reagan helped to drive the global price of crude oil down to about $20 a barrel in the late 1980s. It was part of a deliberate and successful strategy to bankrupt the Soviet Union, which lived off oil and gas exports. That helped to bring down the Berlin Wall and liberate Eastern Europe. That paved the way for the consolidation and expansion of the European Union, which is today a huge driver of clean energy and climate change mitigation.
I also wanted to recall Carter’s solar panels as a reminder that symbols — like solar panels on a White House roof — are an underappreciated aspect of leadership. My friend Andy Karsner, who was an assistant energy secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy under President George W. Bush and helped to persuade Bush to be the first president to light up the White House Christmas tree with superefficient LED bulbs, once remarked to me: “Symbolism counts in politics. It’s all about converting imagination into demonstration — so people can tangibly grasp what a better future can be.”
That’s what inspires “persistence,” he added, and persistence is what gets you over the goal line.
Carter may have had his stumbles as president, but his vision and persistence on solar energy — like his vision and persistence on Middle East peace — deserve to be brightly illuminated today, preferably with an LED bulb powered by solar energy.
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