Jimmy Carter was the 'first global leader to recognize climate change.' Some lessons from our last rural president.

President Carter addressing a town meeting. (Getty Images photo)

Looking back 40 years, climate change was not a popular topic; however, that doesn't mean Americans weren't warned. "Jimmy Carter was the first global leader to recognize the problem of climate change," Jonathan Alter writes for Inside Climate News. "In 1977, he commissioned the Global 2000 Report to the President, an ambitious effort to explore environmental challenges and the prospects of 'sustainable development' over the next 20 years. . . . The White House Council on Environmental Quality issued three reports contending with global warming, the last of which—issued the week before Carter left office—was devoted entirely to the long-term threat of what a handful of scientists then called 'carbon dioxide pollution.'”

One of the CEQ's reports "urged 'immediate action' and included calculations on CO2 emissions in the next decades that proved surprisingly accurate," Atler reports. "A CEQ report suggested trying to limit global average temperature to 2°C above pre-industrial levels — precisely the standard agreed to by the nations of the world 38 years later in the Paris climate accord. . . . With those facts in hand, Reagan’s landslide victory over Carter in the 1980 election takes on a tragic dimension: Carter had acted on every other CEQ report issued in the previous four years with aggressive legislation and executive orders. He almost certainly would have done so on this one, too, had he been reelected. . . . Gains made under Carter’s presidential leadership in the early 1980s might have bought the planet precious time."

Jimmy Carter was a different kind of politician. "He had been a nuclear engineer in the Navy and—while other politicians played golf—he spent his spare time reading scientific publications," Alter writes. During his time in office, "Carter signed 14 major pieces of environmental legislation, including the first fuel economy standards and important new laws to fight air, water and other forms of pollution. He also protected 100 million acres in the Alaska Lands bill, which doubled the size of the National Park Service."

Alter reports, "There are lessons here for the present. Carter was a political failure . . . . but he was a substantive and visionary success.. . It took a while for public opinion to catch up to him. After being burned in effigy in Alaska, he received only 26 percent of the statewide vote in the 1980 presidential election. But by 2000, a billion-dollar tourism industry had blossomed there, and polls showed residents favored Carter’s landmark achievement. . . . When he visited that year, his speech was interrupted five times for standing ovations."