The Carter/Reagan moment and the Biden/Trump moment

We can't let momentum disappear again.

As Jimmy Carter 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.”

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. He 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

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 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, 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.

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 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.

In other energy and climate news:

+Zeke Hausfather has another of his extremely useful reports out today—it attempts to disentangle out the various forces raising the planet’s temperature. If I’m reading it correctly, it indicates that the abatement of aerosol pollution in Asia—cleaner Chinese cities—is unmasking some of the previously hidden global warming.

Over the past decade, CO2 contributed the bulk of greenhouse gas warming at 0.14C, with other greenhouse gases, CH4, and other anthropogenic collectively only warming the planet 0.05C. Due to rapid declines in emissions of planet cooling aerosols (due in large part to declining sulfur emissions from China and international shipping), the planet warmed by around 0.06C over the past decade from greenhouse gas warming previously masked by aerosols. Finally, natural variability had a small (0.03C) cooling effect on the past decade due to the timing of volcanic eruptions and the solar cycle.

Meanwhile, the annual report of the Global Water Monitor is out, and it finds, not surprisingly, that

Daily precipitation extremes were 52% more common in 2024 than during 1995–2005, with record-breaking daily rainfall events in West Africa, Europe and Asia. There has been a significant increasing trend of 4% per decade over land.

+The celebration continues in New York over the signing of the Polluter Pays climate superfund bill that I’ve written so much about—and the momentum is strong. Check out this powerful new video here pushing for a similar law in Maryland. New Yorkers are also celebrating the advent of congestion pricing in Manhattan, which by all accounts is already doing what it’s intended to do: cut congestion! Here’s a particularly savvy column from Nobel economist and New-Jersey-resident-who-knows-the-Lincoln-Tunnel-too-well Paul Krugman. Not only does he offer a proper salute to Charlie Komanoff, who did more than anyone to get this law adopted, he adds

It’s important to establish the principle that those who choose to add to traffic congestion should pay for the burden they’re imposing, and this may eventually lead to pricing that gets closer to reflecting the real costs involved — especially if people begin to see benefits from reduced congestion.

Needless to say, Donald Trump is trying to knock the law back down. We shall see.

Oh, and speaking of congestion—Parisians just voted to make the drivers of huge SUVs pay three times as much for their parking spaces

People with those vehicles will have to pay 18 euros, a little more than $19, for the first hour of public parking in central Paris, and 12 euros in the French capital’s outer neighborhoods — triple the normal rate. For additional hours, prices rise sharply, so drivers of S.U.V.-like vehicles will end up paying more than $240 for six hours of parking in central Paris, instead of around $80 for regular cars.

+Trump will raise even higher the tariff wall protecting America’s car makers from Chinese competition, but as Bloomberg’s Liam Denning points out that’s not much of a longterm strategy

In an echo of how China upended the solar panel industry, it has built a staggering amount of auto manufacturing capacity, enough to make more than 50 million passenger vehicles, of all types, a year. That is roughly double domestic demand and enough to satisfy more than half of the global market. Foreign manufacturers who enjoyed growth and profits from China through joint ventures for decades have seen those collapse, as GM’s write-down illustrates. Chinese exports shot up to six million vehicles last year, overtaking Japan.

Relatedly, China has made itself the EV heartland, accounting for two-thirds of worldwide sales last year and more than 90% of the growth. Even then, domestic sales of 11.2 million EVs equate to only about half of what can be produced there. China also dominates the underlying supply chain.

Detroit should use its moment of protection to actually figure out how to build lots of cheap and useful EVs.

+Great account from the Associated Press Ukraine correspondent of one more reason to build solar farms—they’re harder to destroy in a war and much easier to rebuild.

Attacks on two DTEK solar farms last spring are a good example. They destroyed many solar panels and some of the transformers, which step up voltage for long distances or step it down for use in homes. Replacing the transformers and swapping out destroyed panels allowed the farms, which generate 400 megawatts, to be back up in seven days.

Maxim Timchenko, DTEK CEO, said an attack on a thermal generating station, which experienced a similar amount of damage, took three to four months to rebuild.

“That’s the difference between centralized and so-called decentralized generation. It’s much more resistant and difficult to destroy,” said Timchenko.

+Good for the city of Chicago, which kept its pledge to power all municipal offices with clean energy by year’s end. To make it happen they helped fund the largest solar farm east of the Mississippi.

Chicago’s switch to renewable energy has been almost a decade in the making. The goal of sourcing the city’s power purely from carbon-free sources was first established by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2017. His successor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, struck a 2022 deal with Constellation, an electricity supplier, to purchase the city’s energy from the developer Swift Current Energy beginning in 2025.

Swift Current began construction on the 3,800-acre, 593-megawatt solar farm in central Illinois as part of the same five-year, $422 million agreement. Straddling two counties in central Illinois, the Double Black Diamond Solar project is now the largest solar installation east of the Mississippi River. It can produce enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes, according to Swift Current’s vice president of origination, Caroline Mann.

+An important new paper from Stanford’s Mark Jacobson makes clear that California’s high electricity prices have nothing to do with its renewable energy buildout

“Without renewables, prices would have been higher,” he went on to say. “In fact, 10 of the 11 U.S. states with higher fractions of their demand powered by renewables have among the lowest U.S. electricity prices. Instead, in California, the spot price of electricity dropped by over 50% during the period of interest between 2023 and 2024, indicating it was easier to match demand with supply with the increase in renewables and batteries in 2024.”

According to Jacobson, California electricity prices are high because of several reasons that have nothing to do with renewables. These include high fossil gas prices, utilities passing on to customers the cost of wildfires due to transmission-line sparks, the cost of undergrounding transmission lines to reduce such fires, the costs of the San Bruno and Aliso Canyon gas disasters, the cost of retrofitting gas pipes following San Bruno, the cost of upgrading aging transmission and distribution lines, and the cost of keeping the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant open.

“In sum, available data indicate that increasing the share of wind, solar and hydropower reduces electricity prices throughout the United States,” Jacobson stated. “When high prices occur, they are not due to renewables.”

+Hey, big surprise here. The courageous banks that pledged they were going net zero just a few years at the height of great campaigning by Greta Thunberg and her many colleagues…have tucked their collective tail between their collective shaking legs and withdrawn from the Net Zero Banking Alliance because—well, let Bloomberg explain:

The moves reflect US banks’ desire to shield themselves from increasing political pressure as Donald Trump returns to the White House, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations. And NZBA is bracing for more US exits, Secretariat Lead Sarah Kemmitt told members in a Dec. 31 letter seen by Bloomberg. She cited the “political environment.”

+A law review article from Aaron Regunberg makes the argument that fossil fuel companies should be liable for criminal penalties. Not the executives—that’s petty and pointless—but the companies themselves. He lays out the case with devastating simplicity (and a lotta footnotes)

“Climate change is not a tragedy, it’s a crime.” This refrain, increasingly common among climate activists,^[4] encapsulates rising moral outrage at major fossil fuel companies (“FFCs”) like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP as more information has come to light about their knowledge and conduct regarding climate change. The essential fact pattern is this: FFCs have long understood—with shocking accuracy^[5]—that their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate change.^[6] Instead of changing their business model, alerting the public, or even acquiescing in solutions, FFCs concealed what they knew and executed a multi-million dollar disinformation campaign to spread doubt about climate science.^[7] Internal documents demonstrate that their goal in deceiving the public was to delay or block policy or market responses that would curb their intensively lethal but highly profitable conduct.^[8] They achieved this goal spectacularly, making trillions of dollars from their deception while most of humanity pays an increasingly devastating price.^[9]

+Important essay from Hajar Yazdiha and Dana Fisher in the Hill, arguing that the climate movement should embrace its more radical flanks. They draw heavily on the history of the civil rights movement

Any movement that challenges the status quo will be divisive. Civil rights leaders knew that they were not just challenging unjust laws; they were challenging the very basis of America’s identity and its democracy. Like the struggle for civil rights, the climate movement is fighting to get its battle cry for systemic changes to be heard over the entrenched interests that are clinging to the status quo. So too might the climate movement — and its sympathizers — lean into its efforts to ruffle feathers and wake people up.

And, as if to demonstrate the breadth of this movement, here’s another essay, this one from a retired admiral, on why Florida’s government should knock it off with the climate change denial. As William McQuilkin puts it,

Removing the words “climate change” from state statutes reminded me of the words attributed to Galileo after he was forced to recant his belief that the Earth revolves around the sun. He is said to have uttered, “Eppur si muove,” an Italian phrase that translates to, “And yet it moves.” Our state laws might not want to acknowledge climate change, and yet it changes.

I remember a conservative think tank on the military implications of the opening of the Arctic Ocean due to a warming climate. It was a good discussion and the findings were well received, but I vividly recall one of the panel members closing remark: “Let’s remember that correlation is not causation.” His comments referred to my illustration of the significant retreat of sea ice due to warming temperatures. For me, these comments signified one of the major problems in addressing climate change — an unwillingness by some to be open to a meaningful conversation, despite the rigorous science supporting the data. Instead, they fall back on pat talking points. It also was a reminder of the influence large donors and industry-funded think tanks have on policy.

We cannot let the important work of climate change mitigation and adaptation, of building resilience in our communities, get caught up in the larger culture wars. The stakes are too high, and the work is too great. The scale of the challenge ahead and the costs of adaptation, mitigation and storm recovery will be enormous.

+Solar powered streetlights are spreading! Streetleaf reports its just signed a deal with one of the nation’s bigger homebuilders, and the lights are going in across new subdivisions in California. You know what else is cool? “The streetlights are DarkSky approved and provide dimming options combined with a motion sensor for reducing light pollution without reducing safety.”