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Opinion|What if Reagan Had Been More Like Carter?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/opinion/jimmy-carter-ronald-reagan.html
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Thomas L. Friedman
Dec. 30, 2024, 11:00 a.m. ET
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.
