Jimmy Carter raised climate change concerns 35 years before the Paris Accords

PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — When Jimmy Carter chose branding designs for his presidential campaign, he passed on the usual red, white and blue. He wanted green.

Emphasizing how much the Georgia Democrat enjoyed nature and prioritized environmental policy, the color became ubiquitous. On buttons, bumper stickers, brochures, the sign rechristening the old Plains train depot as his campaign headquarters. Even the hometown Election Night party.

“The minute it was announced, we all had the shirts to put on — and they were green, too,” said LeAnne Smith, Carter’s niece, recalling the 1976 victory celebration.

Nearly a half-century later, environmental advocates are remembering Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100, as a president who elevated environmental stewardship, energy conservation and discussions about the global threat of rising carbon dioxide levels.

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to abandon the renewable energy investments that President Joe Biden included in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, echoing how President Ronald Reagan dismantled the solar panels Carter installed on the White House roof. But politics aside, the scientific consensus has settled where Carter stood two generations earlier.

“President Carter was four decades ahead of his time,” said Manish Bapna, who leads the Natural Resources Defense Council. Carter called for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions well before “climate change” was part of the American lexicon, he said.

Former Vice President Al Gore, whose climate advocacy earned him the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, called Carter “a lifelong role model for the entire environmental movement.”

As president, Carter implemented the first U.S. efficiency standards for passenger vehicles and household appliances. He created the U.S. Department of Energy, which streamlined energy research, and more than doubled the wildnerness area under National Park Service protection.

Inviting ridicule, Carter asked Americans to conserve energy through personal sacrifice, including driving less and turning down thermostats in winter amid global fuel shortages. He pushed renewable energy to lessen dependence on fossil fuels, calling for 20% of U.S. energy to come from alternative sources by 2000.

But laments linger about what 39th president could not get done or did not try before his landslide defeat to Ronald Reagan.

Carter left office in 1981 shortly after receiving a West Wing report linking fossil fuels to rising carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere. Carter’s top environmental advisers urged “immediate” cutbacks on the burning of fossil fuels to reduce what scientists at the time called “carbon dioxide pollution.”

“Nobody anywhere in the world in a high government position was talking about this problem” before Carter, biographer Jonathan Alter said.

The White House released the findings, which drew forgettable news coverage: The New York Times published its story on the 13th page of its front section. And with scant time left in office, there were no tangible moves Carter could make, beyond the energy legislation he had already signed.

The report recommended limiting global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Thirty-five years later, in the 2015 Paris climate accords, participating nations set a similar goal.

“If he had been reelected, it’s fair to say that we would have been beginning to address climate change in the early 1980s,” Alter told the AP. “When you think about that, it adds a kind of a tragic dimension, almost, to his political defeat.”

Reagan ended high-level conversations about carbon emissions. He opposed efficiency standards as government overreach and rolled back some regulations. His chief of staff, Don Regan, called the solar panels “a joke.”

Despite Carter’s emphasis on renewable sources, the fossil fuel industry benefited from his push toward U.S. energy independence.

Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Foundation, pointed to coal-fired power plants built during and shortly thereafter Carter’s term, and his deregulation of natural gas production, a move O'Mara called “a precursor” to widespread fracking. Bapna noted Carter backed drilling off the coasts of Long Island in New York and New England.

Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, pointed to Carter’s Synthetic Fuels Corporation, a short-lived effort to produce fossil fuel alternatives that “would have meant much higher carbon emissions.”

But Carter had the right priorities, especially on research and development coordinated through the Energy Department, Nadel said. “He allowed us to have a national approach rather than one agency here and another there."

Carter’s environmental interests had deep roots going back to a a rural boyhood filled with hunting and fishing and working his father’s farmland.

“Jimmy Carter was an environmentalist before it was a real part of the political discussion — and I’m not talking about solar panels on the White House,” said Dubose Porter, a longtime Georgia Democratic Party leader. “Just focusing on that misses how early and how committed he was.”

His early years influenced Carter as governor, Porter said, when he boosted Georgia's state parks system and opposed Georgia congressmen who wanted to dam a river. Carter paddled the waterway himself and decided its natural state trumped the lucrative federal construction proposal.

In Washington, Carter continued sometimes unwinnable fights against funding for projects he deemed damaging and unnecessary. He found more success extending federal protection for more than 150 million acres (60.7 million hectares), including redwood forests in California and vast swaths of Alaska.

Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth College professor who has written on Carter's faith, said he saw himself as a custodian of divinely granted natural resources.

“That’s a real connection that young evangelicals still have with him today,” Balmer said.

Carter won the presidency amid energy shortages rooted in global strife, especially in the oil-rich Middle East, so national security and economic interests dovetailed with Carter’s religious beliefs and affinity for nature, Nadel noted.

Carter compared the energy crisis to “the moral equivalent of war,” and as inflation and gas lines grew, he called for individual sacrifice and sweeping action on renewable energy.

“Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns,” Carter warned in 1979. “But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”

That “malaise” speech — dubbed so by the media despite Carter not using the word — was unique in presidential politics for its condemnation of unchecked American consumerism. Carter celebrated that more than 100 million Americans watched. By 2010, Carter acknowledged in his annotated “White House Diary” that his speech was a flop, but said it proved to be prescient for advocating bold and direct action on energy.

“You can say the Carter presidency is still producing results today,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, whose 2020 presidential run focused on climate action. “I’ve learned in politics that timing is everything and serendipity is everything.”

Former Associated Press reporter Drew Costley contributed from Washington, D.C.

FILE - Former President Jimmy Carter, center, sits with his grandson Jason Carter, left, and George Mori, executive vice president at SolAmerica Energy during a ribbon cutting ceremony for a solar panel project on Jimmy Carter's farmland in his hometown of Plains, Ga., Feb. 8, 2017. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

FILE - President Jimmy Carter talks to power plant workers against a backdrop of tall stacks at the Louisville Gas and Electric Company plant in Louisville, Ky., July 31, 1979. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - President Jimmy Carter speaks to executives of gas-using businesses at the White House in Washington, Aug. 31, 1978, before the passage of a natural gas compromise bill. (AP Photo/Jeff Taylor, File)

FILE - Lillian Carter, mother of Jimmy Carter, displays her "Jimmy Won!" T-shirt at a train station after Carter was declared the winner in the presidential election, Nov. 3, 1976, in Plains, Ga. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - President Jimmy Carter speaks against a backdrop of solar panels at the White House, June 21, 1979, in Washington. (AP Photo/Harvey Georges, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — It was after one particularly emotional premiere of the new biopic about his life that Robbie Williams resolved he couldn't be “the crying guy” at every screening.

“Better Man,” which chronicles the life of Williams, the British pop star and former Take That singer, can hit him differently at different times. Jet lag is a factor. So is who's in the building. One screening with his band, he says, was “healing.” But he's self-conscious enough about all the emotion that he can be defensive about it.

“In real life I don’t cry that much,” Williams says and then smiles. “You have a (expletive) biography about you and have the world go, ‘I’ve seen you and heard you’ and come tell me how you deal with it.'”

One twist? The Williams heard in “Better Man” is Williams, himself. But the Williams seen in the movie is a computer-generated chimpanzee. Michael Gracey, who directed the 2017 musical hit “The Greatest Showman,” had the novel idea that Williams should get the big-screen biopic treatment, but with a monkey. Relying on Weta's motion capture technology, the actor Jonno Davies stands in for Williams.

In “Better Man,” which is in theaters nationwide Friday, that makes for a compelling spin on the music biopic, partly because it's still a quite R-rated journey through the ups and downs of mega pop stardom.

Williams, who met a reporter recently on a stopover in New York, also hopes it will expand his footprint in America, where he's famously less famous than he is in Europe.

“If I want to phone Macron, I phone Macron. If I want to phone Keir Starmer, I phone Keir Starmer. If I want to phone Trump, he’s not taking my call," Williams says with a laugh. “Maybe he would, I don’t know.”

“Maybe this film moves the needle for me," Williams, 50, adds. "Or if it doesn’t, I’ll do something else.”

What both a conversation with Williams and “Better Man” have in common is a frankness about the experience of fame. More than it's a litany of chart-topping successes, “Better Man” is a chronicle of fame-induced trauma, complete with drug addiction and mental breakdown.

Williams, now, though, is a reformed bad boy — a family man with four kids with all kinds of plans, like building hotels and buying sports teams.

“At the moment," he says, "I have the wide-optimism of a new artist.”

WILLAMS: Well, let me know, in the biography of your life, what animal would play you?

WILLIAMS: I asked my friend this morning, Joey McIntyre, from New Kids on the Block, and he said, “an owl.” And I agreed with him. An owl would be good for him. Did this predate? I guess so, subconsciously. My MO has been cheeky. What’s more cheeky than a cheeky monkey? I’ve been a cheeky monkey all my life. There’s no more cheekier monkey than the coke-snorting, sex-addict monkey that we find in the movie.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, we’ve seen a bear do a lot of coke but never a monkey.

WILLIAMS: We care for animals more than we care for humans, most of us. I guess there is a removal, as well. It’s very much a human story but if you’re watching it and someone’s playing Robbie Williams, you’re thinking: Does he look like him? Does he act like him? Does he talk like him?

WILLIAMS: I think they have sympathy once you come through the other side and you’re talking about something in the past. Everybody loves a story of redemption. The redemption is: I was this guy who experienced this thing but I’ve endured and overcome it. You throw in a word like “endure,” and I can already hear British people going “(Expletive) you! What did you endure? Knickers being thrown at you.” Dude, I was mentally ill. I still am, but I’m in a good place. I couldn’t derive joy from anything because I was mentally ill. I won a sprinting race with two broken legs.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. My story’s not unusual. There’s a boy band documentary that’s going to be on tele in Britain that I’ve taken part in, and everyone’s story is the same. They’ve got the bends. They experienced this thing that warped them and gave them mental breakdowns.

I can’t apologize for the truth, and the truth is there’s something about this matrix-bending, washing-machine fame that’s deeply unhealthy. No matter what job you have or what path you choose in life, you spend the second 20 years of your life sorting out the first 20 years. It just so happens I did it in public and told people exactly what was going as it was going on. And still do.

WILLIAMS: Here’s the thing: I’m always astonished — may he rest in peace, bless him, beautiful boy — that the entertainment industry isn’t littered with those types of cases, that we can’t point to 30 of them.

WILLIAMS: It’s different now. I (expletive) love it. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I’m 50 and I’m incredibly grateful for fame. It facilitates everything that I need and want to do with my life. I was just too young to receive it, and I wasn’t surrounded by good people. And I wasn’t good people. But now I can’t speak highly enough of it. (Laughs)

WILLIAMS: It depends who you are. Most people I meet in the industry, they’re nice folk. But a lot of the people that I meet also are narcissists and they understand on some level that it’s best to cover up their true nature. So they do. Now there’s cancellation, so you’ve got a lot of people terrified of saying the wrong thing.

The interesting that I’ve carved out for me, by mistake, is that the only villain in my story when I talk is me. None of my opinions are political. None of my opinions are cancellable. The only person that can cancel me is me.

WILLIAMS: Ayda was credited with saving my life before she saved my life. I was like, “You (expletive).” I was like: I’ve done a lot of work on myself here. Don’t give her all the credit. But now I can give her way more credit than I was giving her because I’ve realize how much she’s done.

Without that grounding, my life would be a lot different. I probably wouldn’t be here. Because I have somebody in my life that’s worth me being the best version of myself 24 hours out of the day, I’m better. And because there’s four young souls that need looking after, my purpose is a lot different. I suppose my purpose at one time, due to finding hedonism incredibly intoxicating, was to be the most (expletive) person in the room. But now I want to be the most well person in the room. I intend to be the wellest person in the mother-(expletive) room. (Laughs)

WILLLIAMS: Yeah and no. The no bit is: It’s OK. I’ve come to realize, I didn’t die. There’s a bit more wisdom now. The lunatic that was in the car is still in the car, but he doesn’t drive anymore.

Jeanne Cadieu, from left, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Robbie Williams arrive at the 82nd Golden Globes on Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

Robbie Williams arrives at the 82nd Golden Globes on Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)