Carter was “the first president to pass a law on energy efficiency standards that had teeth,” says Jay Hakes, a former administrator of the Energy Information Administration and former director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.
With the former president now in hospice care, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird looks back on Jimmy Carter’s environmental record in the White House — from his sweeping protection of Alaska’s wild lands to his efforts to push the nation toward renewable energy.
The president’s trip to Saudi Arabia is unlikely to reduce oil and gasoline prices, and it is not clear that anything else he might do would work, either.
Long-running environmental disputes in Alaska are like the state’s volcanoes. They can be quiet for years, but rumble to life now and then, venting a little steam here, a little lava there. Only once in a while is there a full-blown eruption.
