...once when he won, and once when he lost.
I mourn the man, not the President however.
That said, his energy policies, despite popular delusional rhetoric to the contrary, were in fact horrible, since they included hyping the useless and extraordinarily expensive solar industry, which has proved ineffective at doing anything to address the extreme global heating we now observe. The fantasy has squandered trillions of dollars for no effective result, except making things worse faster.
When Jimmy Carter took office, in the week beginning January 16, 1076, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere 333.03 ppm.
As of the week just past it is this:
Week beginning on December 22, 2024: 425.59 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 421.75 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 399.08 ppm
Last updated: January 01, 2025
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
The world has largely, foolishly in my view, bought into the bullshit "solar will save us" fantasy at a scale of trillions of dollars for the immediately above result, things getting worse faster.
The Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa: Yet Another Update 12/08/2024
Worse, his energy policies included a proposal for Fischer–Tropsch (FT) chemistry, which had been industrialized at that point, both in Nazi Germany and in Apartheid era South Africa - at at a single Eastman Chemical plant in Tennessee for making methacrylic acid - which was a "coal to oil" proposal. This would have vastly accelerated the release of carbon dioxide since it would have destroyed some of the exergy available from coal, meaning more coal would have been consumed than we did consume.
Had this taken place, we would be looking at far worse carbon dioxide concentrations than we are looking at now, and what we are seeing now, despite all the "solar will save us" bullshit we've heard over the last half a century, is disastrous; I would guess much closer to 500 ppm than we are now, a figure that we will surely reach by the late 2040's based on a crude quadratic model.
Further, despite a claimed fondness for human rights, he kissed up to the torturous regime of the Shah of Iran to gain access to the dangerous fossil fuel petroleum, a regime installed by the United States, at the behest of Great Britain, in Iran in the 1950's.
His policy of declining the reprocessing of nuclear fuels as a "moral example" has left the world with far less isolated fissionable material than it really needs to have any hope of reversing the extreme global heating now observed.
Jimmy Carter was a fine, outstanding man, but he was not a Democratic President of the caliber of many other Democratic Presidents in modern times. Only John F. Kennedy and Woodrow Wilson were worse Presidents in the last century plus, and he does not stand up to the likes of FDR, Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Clinton, Obama, or Biden. All of these men were greater Presidents, and all left a far greater positive mark on the future.
Jimmy Carter's most positive legacy involves the years after he left office, where he was a stellar ex-president, possibly the greatest of all times, because of moral depth, which overcame his less than stellar success we observed when he was in office.
I know that his defeat, which led to the horror of Ronald Reagan, set the United States on its current course of collapse into an orgy of stupidity. A better, wiser Presidency might have prevented this tragedy.
I do not wish to speak ill of the dead but let the dead bury the dead, and let the living, live more wisely than the honored dead lived.
Happy New Year.
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