It’s as if it disappeared when Reagan became President. Most people understood we needed to them are care of our planet. I remember the tv commercial where the lady said, “ it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature”. People understood about ecology and then they stopped saying the word. I guess the oil and gas industries didn’t like that word.

But whenever I hear of natural disasters I think about that phrase.

Those darn hostages though..big pre-occupation of our time seemed like. It's always our policy to never negotiate w terrorists, until a repub needs to do (Reagan, trum)it bc it's the fast answer and American Morays(?) are just platitudes to them. Budget hawks when not in power as well, so the dems pay off the debts they ring up w free wheeling spending, for donors and private gain.

I voted for Jimmy Carter twice, but frankly, like most Americans at the time including him, I didn't know very much about energy. I would have voted for him anyway, even if I knew what I know now, but it would have been a negative choice; he wasn't Ford and he wasn't (gasp) Reagan, both of whom were worse than him.

His energy policy was a disaster. From his 1976 campaign interview.

Jimmy was crucified every time he even uttered curtailing oil. The Gas Shortage happened under him as i recall and it was a wake up for everyone. Instead of swerving off the gasoline path then...he was shut down every time he even suggested reducing car emissions and increasing MPG. The repubs already knew they had to completely bombard the climate folks (we were nt really 'climate folks' back then, but, I sure remember being tied to middle east oil and that was bad in itself and a reason to cut back on driving etc.) They laughed and rode Pres Carter for everything resembling a turn to conservation. That's how I remember it. He was brow beaten by the gop as weak. The mans worked building houses for the poor his entire life. Sounds like a D who concerns himself w other peoples happiness. The enviornment was certainly an issue.

...who made a speech - I remember it well - asking Americans to drive at 55 mph, and then actually got a law passed requiring it.

Oil shocks continued right through the 1970's under all three Presidents at the time.

Despite calls for "human rights" - Carter made a personal friendship with the Shah of Iran - because the Shah controlled, criminally as it but nevertheless practically - huge oil reserves and wasn't participating in Arab boycotts.

I am not here to praise the Iranian Revolution, which was criminal in other ways, but Savak was a secret police force that was completely horrible. Carter had to have known. The hypocrisy of this claim to be concerned about "human rights" while smooth talking the Shah is not morally worth of esteem.

Carter learned, as part of his folk religion, about "moral example." I hold a jaundiced view of people who wish to announce themselves as moral exemplars who everyone else should follow, particularly when they hold deep personal relations with someone like the Shah.

His moral exemplar decision on reprocessing nuclear fuel was a joke, and it was a terrible, terrible, terrible decision in its own right. He brought anti-nuke nonsense to the mainstream in this party, thus rendering it totally incapable of actually addressing climate change and possibly eliminating the need for any energy mining for centuries to come.

As for climate change and the fetish about "conservation..."

The problem is that Americans in the 1970's thought that they were the only people in the world who mattered. They were disinterested in the unimaginable poverty of India and China, which contained the bulk of the world's population. The exemplar that the Indians and Chinese chose was the materialism of the US. They decided to improve their standard of living the same way the Americans did, by burning coal.

We are now, on this planet, consuming more that 576 exajoules of energy each year. In 1976, we were consuming less than 400. We have more than doubled coal consumption internationally since 1973. Sorry, but Indians and Chinese did not agree to remain unimaginably impoverished so Americans could all run around in Tesla cars powered by the sun.

Sun powered cars are still a joke, a very bad joke since we are now experiencing climate horrors all over the world.

Carter's work for human rights after leaving office has been wonderful. But that doesn't change who he was when he was in office.

He's a Democrat; I'm a Democrat, but frankly, he was by far, the worst Democratic President of my lifetime which includes JFK, another Democrat who is, in my opinion, not consistent with my views of what an effective Democratic President should be, and is vastly over rated by both historians and members of our party.

My ideal of what an American President should be - and what a Democrat should be - is Barack Obama. I wish we had nominated someone else in 1976, more Obama and far less Carter.

I don't know if he would have won the election, since he would not have been able to incorporate the south, which Carter nearly swept, into his coalition.

It is true that Carter had a big lead at one point, but I think that margin was always destined to come down. People forget that Bill Clinton also had a big lead in 1992 and it did eventually come down from 20 points to 5.5. For the record, Perot had nothing to do with him winning. For most of the race Perot was taking more votes from Clinton than Bush, which is why Bush wanted him in the debates. It wasn't until election day that you could finally say he took equally from both candidates.

In 2016 HRC's lead would not have come down in the final couple weeks had it not been for Comey and Putin. And the polls that had her up were very accurate. People were not ashamed to admit they were voting for Donald Trump. Of course, a big part of why she was ahead, and why her lead was so solid, is because people were happy with the progress our country had made under Obama. The media portrayed 2016 as the ultimate change election, but that wasn't true. Trump won because the FBI set out to destroy the Democratic candidate.

JFK did two big things in his presidency. First, he got us through the Cuban Missile Crisis. Second, he put a man on the moon. Also, he began laying the foundation for Medicare.

...was an event that shouldn't have happened in the first place.

If Donnie succeeds - as is unlikely - at getting the Chinese to buy Soybeans from the US, he will merely be solving a crisis of his own creation. He will deserve no credit, although he might try to take it anyway.

JFK was an unconstructed Cold Warrior. His brother, RFK worked for Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn for crying out loud. He appointed his brother to be AG anyway. Kennedy himself was the only Democrat to not vote for the Censure.

The Vienna summit and the Bay of Pigs convinced Khrushchev that Kennedy was a light weight and this incompetence led to the world almost stumbling into Nuclear war. That's not an accomplishment; it's a lucky break in avoiding the consequences of one's own recklessness.

The outcome was to lead to an expensive and unnecessary arms race that robbed both sides.

In context the Space Race was nothing more than more cold war crap. Now arguably the American people would not have supported the Space Race outside of military posturing, but Kennedy was nowhere near a competent as LBJ. I'm not sure that if elected in 1960 in lieu of Kennedy that LBJ would have Vietnam as a scar on his record.

I don't buy the argument that JFK would have pulled out of Vietnam. The people in his cabinet, notably CEO type Robert McNamara were precisely the Cold Warriors responsible for the myopic Cold Warrior stuff. Johnson erred in allowing these men to persist, but he was a greater man than Kennedy ever was.

To conserve our energy resources we might have made some headway during that decade, and possibly bought ourselves some more time.

Too late for that now.

The First Earth Day
April 22, 1970
We only have one earth, so we need to take care of her. That's what Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin believed. He was disturbed that an issue as important as our environment was not addressed in politics or by the media, so he created the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970. An estimated 20 million people nationwide attended festivities that day. It was a truly astonishing grassroots explosion, leading eventually to national legislation such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

It's all a matter of how much time is left, how long can we put off the inevitable.
Do people still think the oligarchs don't know that we are past the tipping point? Why do you think there's a race to grab the most real wealth and to centralize power? Then there are the Dominionists; think opiate of the masses and self fulfilling prophecy. They are a handy tool.
You can come up with your own hypothesis. It's pretty simple.

It is going to be more than millions who are killed. Climate change may cost hundreds of millions of life. And if we don't solve the problem it may mean an end to our civilization.