The former president laid the groundwork for decades of progress in reducing energy waste in homes and businesses. Now, the incoming administration threatens to stall momentum and even undo recent gains, risking higher costs.
ACEEE celebrates the life and mourns the loss of President Jimmy Carter. Carter famously touted energy conservation—putting on a sweater and turning the thermostat down—as critical for energy independence and national security. But he did far more: His administration created policies and research initiatives that were the foundation for decades of progress in using energy more efficiently.
Today, as we honor Carter’s legacy, policy proposals touted by the incoming Trump administration could threaten energy-saving programs. Stalling progress now would be a costly mistake. Given high living costs, increasing extreme weather, and new strains on the electric grid, using the same energy-saving tools initiated by Carter—tailored to today’s challenges—is more critical than ever.
Research and deployment of energy-saving technologies
President Carter built federal support for energy efficiency technologies—which remains critical today. He did this through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which he created in 1977 by combining existing agencies.
DOE's work has improved our daily lives. For example, most new windows in the early 1970s leaked lots of heat in the winter and allowed summertime rays to overheat homes and offices. During Carter’s administration, DOE sponsored the research and development of windows that used a new (largely invisible) coating that helps retain heat inside buildings in the winter while minimizing unwanted heat from the sun’s rays in the summer. These coatings reduce energy loss through windows by as much as 30% to 50%. Together with the use of argon gas between glass panes, this technology transformed windows, averting $150 billion in home energy costs to date.
The department President Carter helped create continues to support key technology advances. For instance, DOE is now disbursing billions of dollars to support industrial facilities deploying new processes that reduce energy use and emissions and position U.S. manufacturers to be leaders in the production methods of the future.
The work ahead should include helping millions more households install those energy-efficient windows and spurring industries to adopt more clean technologies. The progress we’ve achieved hinges on sustaining these investments, as Carter’s vision reminds us. However, President-elect Trump has suggested a very different path, calling for repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, which supports efficiency upgrades in homes and the billions in industrial investments.
Laying the groundwork to cut energy waste from appliances and equipment
In the 1970s, there were no federal efficiency standards for appliances and equipment, which meant many types used far more energy than needed—at consumers’ and businesses’ expense.
President Carter planted some of the seeds to fix this. The 1978 bipartisan energy law he led (which included the National Energy Conservation Policy Act) strengthened an earlier law that had given the government the power to set standards, saying it must do so. He proposed the first standards for individual products, only to see them dropped by his successor.
But after several states created their own standards, the federal government, under subsequent laws in 1987 and later, followed with standards for dozens of products. This has saved households and businesses more than $1 trillion and counting on utility bills. The legal imperative that regulators must consider strengthening standards—later bolstered to require regular reviews of all of them to keep pace with technological progress—has been crucial.
Today this tool is critical for the necessary progress ahead. The Biden administration has strengthened standards for numerous products, from water heaters to washing machines. However, it still must finalize several others proposed to achieve its target of providing $1 trillion in additional consumer savings over 30 years and cumulatively reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2.5 billion metric tons or more.
This progress could be attacked, though. For instance, Project 2025 calls for canceling federal appliance standards, which would raise costs for households and businesses. Carter’s foundational work on efficiency standards helped drive energy savings, and it would be a costly mistake to stall or reverse progress now.
Enlisting utilities to help reduce home and business energy waste
In the 1970s, energy efficiency itself was an emerging concept, and researchers were just starting to focus intensively on policy and program mechanisms for improving efficiency in existing homes and buildings. President Carter’s 1978 law set an early marker here, too. It required utilities to offer homeowners energy audits, revealing how their homes were losing energy—and where improvements could have the biggest impact. In this way, Carter helped establish the idea that a utility should play a key role in reducing energy waste in a home or business.
Many years later, electric and gas utilities created major programs that provided free audits and financial incentives for their customers to make energy-saving improvements. Today, utilities in some leading states reduce electricity use by an additional 2% or so annually through these programs.
The challenge for these programs today is not a federal threat but that utilities and their regulators should use them to their full potential. They need to ramp these programs up to help address increased load growth, reduce emissions, and ensure they better serve low-income households to reduce their energy costs.
Calling for more-efficient cars
President Carter championed efficient vehicles. In the 1978 energy law, he created a “gas guzzler” tax on particularly inefficient cars and trucks. He rebuffed automakers’ push to weaken standards set in a 1976 law and criticized U.S. automakers for being slow to shift to smaller, generally far more efficient models.
Carter’s warning should apply today. While cars in the U.S. shrank in response to the oil crisis and high fuel costs of the 1970s, they have grown again in recent years and decades. As a result, average vehicle efficiency has improved only modestly in the last several years, with the growth in vehicle size effectively canceling out much of the efficiency gains made through other vehicle improvements.
In the spring of 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized standards for cars and trucks to increase efficiency and accelerate the transition to electric vehicles. Here, too, the Trump administration could threaten progress. If vehicle efficiency standards are rolled back, as Trump’s team plans, consumers will end up paying more as they drive less-efficient cars.
Carter’s legacy on energy is still in our hands today
These often-underappreciated steps from Carter on energy efficiency would prove essential seeds for progress in saving energy in the years and decades that followed (and paved the way for ACEEE’s work over the last four decades). Without the reductions we've made in energy waste since 1980, energy consumption in the United States today would be about 60% higher, and carbon emissions would be 80% higher.
But we have tremendous work ahead. Given high daily costs, growing electric demand, and the climate crisis, now is the time to redouble our efforts in cutting energy waste, not stall or take steps back. Continuing this work not only honors Carter—it’s a necessity for our future.
Cover photo credit: The White House Rose Garden by Tina Hager. In-line photo credit: Photo by Commonwealth Club / CC BY 2.0
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