Commentators later blamed Carter’s modest call to reduce energy demand for Reagan’s decisive victory, arguing that Carter had unwittingly ushered in the neoliberal era by kicking off a culture war over energy production.
Fifty years on, the Biden administration has largely stuck with Carter’s “all of the above” approach to energy, spurring on renewables and fossil fuel development simultaneously. Apparently wary of Carter comparisons, however, it avoids any explicit talk about reducing energy demand—even as government-funded investments in public transit and building electrification (for instance) promise to create millions of jobs while cutting electricity costs and use. Top Democrats’ compulsion to continually prove that they’re not out to reduce consumption is a core piece of Carter’s environmental legacy too, and one Republicans still tap into frequently. It didn’t take long for the likes of the American Enterprise Institute to start comparing Joe Biden to Carter, citing geopolitical worries and nonexistent plans to “tax and regulate the fossil fuel industry out of existence.”
But both sides here are wrong: Carter’s environmental policy didn’t trip up his broader platform. It was his broader platform that sabotaged his environmental policy. Whatever else he was, Carter was an austerian through and through. Core to his governing philosophy was a firm belief in the virtues of fiscal conservatism and deep skepticism about state meddling. Rick Perlstein—author of an exhaustive account of the Carter years, Reaganland—calculated that Carter used the word “sacrifice” 479 times in speeches and statements over his four-year term. That stance, reflected in his environmental politics, created many of the problems that plagued his administration—and that helped bring Reagan to power.
Carter’s early decision to let Nixon-era price controls expire, for instance—and refusal to return to that tool later—was remembered even by his advisers as one of the administration’s worst mistakes. Chief domestic policy adviser Stuart Eizenstat said in 1981 that giving up those powers meant the administration was unable to prevent rising energy prices “from lapping over into the rest of the economy.” His inflation czar, Barry Bosworth, resigned as a result.
“One of my Administration’s major goals is to free the American people from the burden of over-regulation,” Carter said within six weeks of taking office. As inflation took hold, he took aim at supposed government excess. Carter’s administration accordingly led a charge to deregulate important sectors like airlines, banking, rail, trucking, and communications. He passed austerity budgets that cut social spending, and he helped defang proposals for a federal job guarantee. On the same morning that Carter signed a bill establishing a Superfund to clean up toxic waste, he also signed the Paperwork Reduction Act to “eliminate unnecessary federal regulations,” kvelling that it would “regulate the regulators.” The act spawned the Office of Management and Budget, which the Reagan White House used to dismantle much of what remained of the New Deal and Great Society.