Jimmy Carter: and what we have today

[Jitendra Hydonus]

We actually had a president once who put solar panels on the White House roof, then went home to Georgia and turned his peanut field into a solar farm that still keeps the lights on for half his town.

Jimmy Carter died in December 2024 at age 100. The solar farm is still humming.

3,852 panels rotate with the sun across what used to be soybean rows in Plains, Georgia. On a good day they generate 1.3 megawatts, the equivalent of burning roughly 3,600 tons of coal.

Georgia Power is locked into a 25-year purchase agreement that runs until 2042. The town has 727 people. More than half of them get their electricity from a field their neighbor built when he was 92.

Carter put 32 solar panels on the White House in 1979, during the Arab oil embargo. Reagan ripped them down two years later. Some of those originals now sit in a museum in Dezhou, China.

Now look at where we are.

Trump  bulldozed the entire East Wing to make room for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom modeled on his Mar-a-Lago estate. The price tag has doubled from $200 million to nearly $400 million. Senate Republicans are now scrambling to hand over another $1 billion in taxpayer money for "security."

And while wrecking balls swung at the East Wing, Trump signed the "One Big Beautiful Bill".

Working families lost an average of $9,000 in savings on a typical install. Utility-scale wind and solar projects must now break ground before the end of 2026 or lose their credits entirely.

Bloomberg Tax projects annual clean-energy installations will drop 41% after 2027.

So your electric bill climbs. The grid burns dirtier. Oil and gas executives toast another quarter. A kid born this year inherits a planet running hotter.

We had a president once who left the White House and spent forty years building houses for poor families and bolting panels onto a peanut farm.

We could choose that kind of leadership again. We just have to want it badly enough.