Jimmy Carter Talks Solar Energy
I grew up on a farm outside of Plains, Georgia. It was the Great Depression years; we didn’t have electricity or running water. The first appliance we had was a windmill, for piping water into our house.
In fact, we didn’t have any gasoline or diesel motors for a number of decades; mules and horses did all the work. We got all our energy from growing corn—the animals that we worked, the animals that we ate, and all the human beings depended on corn as just about our only fuel. We were totally renewable back then.
So when I became president, it was natural for me to want to extend this capability to people who were in danger of losing their energy supply. Because we had a good relationship with Israel—I tried to bring peace between Israel and Egypt—we had oil embargos. We lost our customary supply of oil, so I was very interested in seeing America be energy secure. It was a national security issue—all our tanks, our ships, our trains depended on oil back in those days.
I was the driving force for renewable energy when I was president. I made a series of speeches about it, my staff wrote the legislation, and we got various members of Congress to offer their support. It’s important for the president to set an example, so in 1979, I installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the White House. I made a public commitment in 1979 that by the year 2000 we would have at least 20 percent of the nation’s energy coming from renewable sources—from geothermal, or from the wind or the sunshine.
We had special programs that I got through Congress to give bonuses for finding new kinds of energy. We…
