Tuesday, December 31, 2024
Trump aims to crush legal curbs on his climate rollback – but it may not be easy | Donald Trump | The Guardian
Trump aims to crush legal curbs on his climate rollback – but it may not be easy
"The president-elect said he will ‘stop the wave of frivolous litigation from environmental extremists’ but the ability to block suits will be limited, experts say
Donald Trump has promised to deregulate the energy sector, boost fossil fuels, dismantle environmental rules and otherwise attack climate progress. However, experts and advocates say that lawsuits that aim to hold the fossil fuel sector responsible for deceiving the public about the climate crisis still “have a clear path forward”.
“The overwhelming evidence of the industry’s lies and ongoing deception does not change with administrations,” said Richard Wiles, president of the non-profit Center for Climate Integrity, which tracks and supports the litigation. There are more than 30 accountability lawsuits active around the US brought by states and municipalities accusing fossil fuel interests of covering up the climate risks of their products or seeking damages for impacts. “Climate deception lawsuits against big oil have a clear path forward no matter who is in the White House.”
On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to “stop the wave of frivolous litigation from environmental extremists”.
But the administration’s ability to block the suits will be limited, Wiles said.
Since the federal government is neither plaintiff nor defendant in any of the suits, Trump’s election will not directly affect their outcome. And since each case was filed in state court, the president cannot appoint judges who will oversee them.
However, if any of the cases are sent to the federal courts – something oil companies have long pushed for but have not achieved – Trump’s rightwing appointees could rule in favor of fossil fuel companies.
“The most important impact that Trump will have on the climate accountability litigation is the justices he has appointed to the supreme court,” said Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
In his first term, Trump appointed three justices to the high court, including two with ties to the fossil fuel industry.
In early December, Joe Biden’s solicitor general urged the supreme court to reject requests from fossil fuel interests to quash two climate accountability lawsuits, after a July call from the court for the administration to weigh in. Experts say Trump’s White House could attempt to politically tip the scales in favor of the oil companies.
“The views of the federal government tend to carry weight with the supreme court, so if Trump did that it would give a bit of a boost to the oil companies,” said Daniel Farber, who directs the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.
But that doesn’t guarantee that the court would agree with the administration, he said. “The court doesn’t always listen to the government’s view, and it would really depend on how persuasively they were able to argue the point,” Farber said.
Trump’s justice department could also file influential “friend of the court” briefs in the cases, said Gerrard.. The Biden administration filed such a brief in support of the plaintiff last year, whereas Trump’s previous administration reliably supported the defendants and is expected to do so again.
These can have a significant impact on the outcome of a case, but similarly do not guarantee an outcome.
Another possibility advocates are preparing for: Trump could work with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress to attempt to offer legal immunity to the fossil fuel industry from the lawsuits.
But such a measure is unlikely to succeed, even with a Republican trifecta, said Farber.
“You’d need 60 votes to break the filibuster in the Senate, and that means they would need to pick up seven Democrats,” he said. “I just don’t see that happening.”
The firearms industry successfully won a liability waiver in 2005 which has successfully blocked most attempts to hold them accountable for violence. Fossil fuel companies have pushed to be granted the same treatment, but have failed so far.
The Trump administration’s pledges to roll back environmental regulation and boost fossil fuels could inspire additional climate accountability litigation.
“If they feel like other channels for change have gotten cut off, maybe that would make the legal channel more appealing,” said Farber.
Climate accountability suits filed by cities and states have gained steam in recent months. In December, a North Carolina town launched the nation’s first-ever climate accountability lawsuit against an electric utility. In November, Maine also filed a suit against big oil, while a Kansas county sued major fossil fuel producers, alleging they had waged “a decades-long campaign of fraud and deception about the recyclability of plastics”.
Even amid Trump’s expected environmental rollbacks, the suits are a way to “secure some measure of justice and accountability for big oil’s climate lies and the damages that they’ve caused”, said Wiles."
Opinion | Our New Year’s resolution for 2025 is to embrace uncertainty - The Washington Post
2025 promises to be tumultuous. Here’s our New Year’s resolution.
"In a gloomy age, we should welcome the unknown, because the future might be better than the past.
The year 2000 opened with Russian President Boris Yeltsin stepping down before his term ended. A Post editorial on Jan. 1, 2000, wondered whether his successor, Vladimir Putin, would manipulate the media and government agencies to his advantage — “or will he seek to extend the brighter strands of Mr. Yeltsin’s legacy and find strength in true democracy and rule of law?”
Twenty-five years later, much has changed. The relative peace and prosperity of the 1990s turned out to be a short-lived break from history, not the end of it. The new millennium brought the Sept. 11 attacks, misadventures in Iraq, the 2008-2009 Great Recession and the covid-19 pandemic. Few anticipated the extent to which Mr. Putin would plunge his country into totalitarianism as he sought to rebuild the Soviet empire, including with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The forward march of globalization and democracy that seemed inevitable a quarter-century ago now appears anything but. Rather than integrating with the rules-based international system, China is challenging that order — and, increasingly, the United States appears willing to undermine the global institutions it created. Assumptions that liberal democratic capitalism creates inexorable progress have been supplanted by a new movement that advocates “degrowth” and reflects a pervasive dread that things can only get worse.
A new year offers occasion for reflection on the past and resolutions for the future. It’s striking how few analysts foresaw the most consequential events that followed the dawn of the new century. As 2015 began, halfway through the 2010s, no one anticipated that Donald Trump would, within months, come to dominate and redefine American politics for a generation. Halfway through the 2020s, what aren’t we anticipating?
Humans don’t like unpredictability and crave certitude, even though most forecasts tend to be wrong. But reality can surprise on the upside as well as the down. If, in 2000, many were too rosy in their predictions, in 2025 many might be too dire. So, our New Year’s resolution for 2025 is to embrace uncertainty. In a pessimistic age, society should welcome the unknown, because the future might be better than the past.
Follow Editorial Board
Wisdom requires humility. Just a few weeks ago, we drafted an editorial previewing the upcoming battle for Damascus. Before we could publish the piece, the regime of former president Bashar al-Assad fell. That’s the nature of daily journalism, but we’re taking it as a reminder to expect the unexpected and allow for the widest range of possible outcomes. That’s the nature of journalism, too — or should be.
Also important is admitting mistakes and learning from them. The Editorial Board was wrong to assume that Russia sabotaged the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline. It turns out, as The Post has reported, that the likeliest scenario is that Ukrainians, hoping to lessen European dependence on Russian gas, were behind the attack. That doesn’t mean Washington should cut off Kyiv, but it’s important to call out allies as well as adversaries when they err.
The United States is entering a stretch that we assume will be chaotic and tumultuous, but we must allow for the possibility that the next phase of history will surprise in that respect, too. That doesn’t require ignoring reality, such as the crushing national debt, climate change or President-elect Donald Trump’s record. Still less does it call for discounting the lessons of history, such as the dangers of isolationism and protectionism. What it does demand is acknowledging that not every plausible negative outcome will be borne out.
There’s a fascinating interplay between alarmism and complacency, between catastrophizing about the future and idealizing the past. A little fear is necessary to spur action; too much becomes paralyzing. Millions of Americans have stopped following the news, many because they’re so certain it will be bad news that they’re tuning out. They’re missing out. It’s easy to lose sight of the reality that there has never been a better time to be alive. The poorest Americans have access to better medical care than the richest royals did a century ago. The country has been far more divided than it is now, yet it endured.
How different will the world look on Jan. 1, 2050? Or 2075? Or 2100? A new guard of leaders will emerge at home. But Russia will also almost certainly be without Mr. Putin, now 72. Will what follows be better for the Russian people and for global stability? We hope so, but no one can say for sure. Rather than assume the worst, let’s resolve to do everything we can to help engineer the best possible outcome for the world."
How Elon Musk Has Planted Himself Almost Literally at Trump’s Doorstep - The New York Times
How Elon Musk Has Planted Himself Almost Literally at Trump’s Doorstep
"For much of the period since Election Day, the billionaire has been staying at a $2,000-a-night cottage at Mar-a-Lago, giving him easy access to the president-elect.
Elon Musk plays many roles with President-elect Donald J. Trump. He is Mr. Trump’s most important donor, most influential social media promoter and a key adviser on policy and personnel.
For most of the time since Election Day, he has also been Mr. Trump’s tenant.
Mr. Musk has been using one of the cottages available for rent on Mr. Trump’s property at Mar-a-Lago, the former Marjorie Merriweather Post home in Florida that Mr. Trump converted into a members-only club and hotel in the 1990s, according to two people with knowledge of the arrangement. The cottage where he has been staying, named Banyan, is several hundred feet away from the main house, according to a person who knows the property.
Staying right on the grounds has helped provide Mr. Musk with easy access to Mr. Trump.
He can drop in on Mr. Trump’s dinners, such as one he had recently with Mr. Musk’s rival, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Mr. Musk, who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars in the final months of this year’s election cycle to help elect Mr. Trump, has attended personnel meetings in the Mar-a-Lago Teahouse, sat in on phone calls with foreign leaders and spent hours with Mr. Trump in his office. Mr. Musk’s employees from his various businesses have also been integrally involved in the transition, vetting prospective candidates for senior administration jobs, in interviews at the Trump transition headquarters in West Palm Beach.
Mr. Musk is not the only member of the president-elect’s inner circle who has been bunking on Mr. Trump’s property. Vice President-elect JD Vance has stayed in one of the cottages at Mar-a-Lago when he has been in Palm Beach and has been there frequently during the transition, according to a person with knowledge of his stays. And others are said to have used cottages since Election Day. But few have been as omnipresent as Mr. Musk.
The cottage being used by Mr. Musk has been used over the years by many friends and associates of Mr. Trump.
Years ago, former Speaker John Boehner stayed at Banyan with a friend, before Mr. Trump became a presidential candidate.
Mr. Trump has bragged to people that Mr. Musk — the world’s richest man — is “renting” one of the residential spaces at Mar-a-Lago. It is unclear how much Mr. Musk will ultimately end up paying for the cottage, which historically has rented for at least $2,000 a night, according to a person with knowledge of the fees.
Officials at the club do not typically bill guests until the end of their stay, leaving open the possibility that Mr. Trump will choose not to charge Mr. Musk, or to reduce the size of his bill. But Mr. Trump is not known to shy away from income opportunities.
Mr. Musk moved into the cottage around Election Day and watched the returns at Mar-a-Lago with Mr. Trump. He left the property around Christmas and has been expected to return in the coming days.
Mr. Musk is known around the club to make requests like meals outside the normal kitchen hours. While staying at Mar-a-Lago, he has been accompanied by at least two of his children — Mr. Musk has at least 11 — and their nannies.
One of the mothers of his children, Shivon Zilis, who worked for Mr. Musk at his brain implant company Neuralink, has also been photographed at Mar-a-Lago, after the election.
Mr. Musk travels frequently and is known to stay at properties owned by his friends. In San Francisco, he has been known to stay at the home of David Sacks, the venture capitalist whom Mr. Trump nominated recently to be an adviser on cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. While in Hawaii, he has resided at places owned by the billionaire Larry Ellison on the island of Lanai.
Mar-a-Lago is different, however, in being a for-profit enterprise owned by Mr. Trump rather than a private home.
A spokesman for the Trump transition did not respond to an email seeking comment about the arrangement. Mr. Musk did not respond to an email request for comment.
On Friday, in a post on Truth Social that seemed intended as a private communication to Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump wrote: “Where are you? When are you coming to the ‘Center of the Universe,’ Mar-a-Lago. Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT.”
Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have privately griped about how much influence Mr. Musk has had on the transition and how inseparable he is from the president-elect.
Mr. Musk is unlikely to have such unfettered physical access to Mr. Trump after the president-elect is sworn in on Jan. 20 in Washington. Coming and going in the West Wing is more onerous than at Mr. Trump’s private clubs, as is access to the White House residence.
Still, Mr. Trump has often liked to collect people, and has enjoyed knowing that many of them pay for access to him. Since he first took office, people seeking to curry favor with him — or to get face time with him — have joined his clubs, rented ballrooms at his properties or stayed in his hotels.
Mr. Trump is said to have increased the initial membership fee at Mar-a-Lago to $1 million.
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan
Ryan Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry. More about Ryan Mac"
China Hacked Treasury Dept. in ‘Major’ Breach, U.S. Says - The New York Times
China Hacked Treasury Dept. in ‘Major’ Breach, U.S. Says
"The episode comes at a particularly sensitive moment, just as the Biden White House is dealing with one of the most far-reaching, and damaging, hacks into American infrastructure in the cyberage.
One of China’s intelligence agencies hacked the U.S. Treasury Department, gaining access to the workstations of government employees and unclassified documents, the Biden administration said on Monday, the latest in a series of embarrassing surveillance operations against major American institutions.
It was unclear from the Treasury’s limited first account of the episode exactly what the hackers were seeking. But senior officials with access to the intelligence on the breach said that it appeared to be entirely an espionage operation and not part of other Chinese efforts to insert malicious computer code into utility grids and water supply systems, giving them a capability to shut off critical American infrastructure.
In a letter informing lawmakers of the episode, the Treasury Department said it had been notified on Dec. 8 by a third-party software service company, BeyondTrust, that the hacker had obtained a security key that allowed it to gain remote access to certain Treasury workstations and documents on them.
“Based on available indicators, the incident has been attributed to a China state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor,” the letter said. “In accordance with Treasury policy, intrusions attributable to an APT are considered a major cybersecurity incident.”
Top Chinese officials have a deep interest in the activities of the Treasury Department, which oversees sensitive data about global financial systems — and estimates of China’s own troubled economy. The department also implements sanctions against Chinese firms, including, in recent times, those aiding Russia in the war against Ukraine.
Earlier in the year, Chinese intelligence cracked email accounts used by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo as she was making determinations about new export controls on advanced semiconductors and other key technology, an attempt to slow their acquisition by Chinese firms. Similar efforts were made against targets in the State Department.
But the admission by the administration about the Treasury Department comes at a particularly sensitive moment, just as the Biden White House is dealing with one of the most far-reaching, and damaging, hacks into American infrastructure in the cyberage.
In recent months, a series of revelations have shown how a sophisticated Chinese intelligence group, called Salt Typhoon, penetrated deep into at least nine U.S. telecommunications firms.
That breach exploited critical gaps in the patched-together U.S. telecommunications infrastructure, giving the hackers access to not only text messages but also phone conversations. Investigators said that among the targets were the commercial, unencrypted phone lines used by President-elect Donald J. Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance and top national security officials, though it is not clear what conversations, if any, the hackers were able to monitor.
The Salt Typhoon hackers also obtained a nearly complete list of phone numbers the Justice Department has wiretapped to monitor people suspected of crimes or espionage, giving the Chinese government insight into which Chinese spies the United States has identified — and which it has missed. As a result, the breach has concerned counterintelligence officials, who fear that Beijing will learn who is under suspicion and who is not.
The Treasury Department said it had worked with the F.B.I., the intelligence community and other investigators to determine the impact of the latest breach. The compromised service has been taken offline, and there is no evidence that the Chinese hackers still have access to Treasury information, the department said.
In a statement, a Treasury spokesman said that the department took threats against its systems and the data they hold seriously, and that it would continue to work with the private sector and government agencies to protect the financial system from hacking.
The Treasury Department did not clarify when the episode took place but said it would reveal more details in a forthcoming report to Congress.
On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry, Mao Ning, called the allegation by the United States “groundless.” Ms. Mao added that China opposed all forms of hacking attacks and “we are even more opposed to the spread of false information against China for political purposes.”
Chinese officials have long denied any government role in hacking, and have set up dialogues with the United States to work together on cybersecurity. Earlier this month, officials from the Treasury Department traveled to China for a round of meetings of their economic and financial working groups, which cover collaboration on cybersecurity issues.
In response to the Salt Typhoon hack, the Commerce Department said this month that it would ban the few remaining operations of China Telecom, one of the country’s biggest communications firms, from the United States.
Alan Rappeport and Zixu Wang contributed reporting.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade. More about Ana Swanson
David E. Sanger covers the Biden administration and national security. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written several books on challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger"
Monday, December 30, 2024
Musk calls some Trump supporters ‘contemptible fools,’ escalating tensio...
I can’t believe I actually agree with Elon Musk on an issue. Bannon is so stupid. He opposes immigration of HB1 VISA holders. Bannon is a poorly educated racist.
Jimmy Carter, on Death - The New York Times
“I found I was absolutely, completely at ease about death.”
“I’m going to live again.”
Jimmy Carter, on Death
"Jimmy Carter brought up death — specifically, his own — at what turned out to be the last Sunday school class he would teach at Maranatha Baptist Church. It was November 2019. He’d recently fallen and fractured his pelvis, a setback that followed a string of illnesses and injuries that reminded everyone around him — and himself, it seems — that despite his mental acuity and physical vigor, he was 95 and would not live forever.
Mr. Carter’s death on Sunday at 100, has spurred an examination of a sprawling legacy: the successes and failures of his presidency; his work to eradicate diseases and bolster free and fair elections; his involvement with nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity.
Here is something else he left behind: In a culture where death as a subject is often taboo and engulfed in an aura of fear, he amassed over the years — across writing, public comments and Sunday school lessons — a compilation of observations that amounted to a candid, cleareyed, evolving exploration of the end.
He wrote about death in books — and he wrote more books than any other American president. He discussed it in speeches and in correspondence with friends.
Those observations were a product of his Christian faith. His perspective also grew out of experience, a fluency with death that came from seeing many of his closest family members, including all of his younger siblings, die before him.
His views were also shaped by his own advancing age. He described the sense of the inevitable looming over him and the health challenges that had piled up, including cancer that had spread to his brain.
At Sunday school that morning in 2019, he said that he did not think he would survive for long after his cancer diagnosis in 2015. “I assumed, naturally, I was going to die very quickly,” he told the packed church. He lived nine more years.
Mr. Carter atop his Shetland pony named Lady in 1928.
“By the time I was 12 or 13 years old, my anxiety about this became so intense that at the end of every prayer, until after I was an adult, before Amen I added the words ‘And, God, please help me believe in the resurrection.’”
“Living Faith,” 1996
Mr. Carter recalled the worries he had as a young person, stirred by learning in church about Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection and by the pastor’s sermons about how “all believers,” as he put it, “would someday enjoy a similar resurrection.”
“As I grew older,” Mr. Carter wrote, “I began to wonder whether this could be true.”
He was concerned as a boy that even an iota of doubt could lead him to a different fate, relegating him to an eternity separated from his family, particularly his parents. “These two people were the core of my existence,” he wrote, “and I couldn’t bear the idea that I would not be with them forever.”
Mr. Carter prayed before teaching a Sunday school in Plains, Ga.
“I realize that my physical strength and endurance are steadily declining, and I am having to learn how to conserve them, but I have found with relief and gratitude — even when facing the prospect of an early death from cancer in my liver and brain — that my faith as a Christian is still unwavering and sustaining.”
“Faith: A Journey for All,” published in 2018
As he matured, Mr. Carter’s faith firmed and came to define his approach to life — and death.
He considered himself a born-again Christian. In a 2012 interview with an influential evangelical theologian, Mr. Carter said his aim had been to “pattern my life and my own fallible human ways after Jesus’s life.”
“Faith in something,” he has written in several books, “is an inducement not to dormancy but to action.”
Mr. Carter spoke to a Sunday school class at Maranatha Baptist Church.
“If I were an amputee, for instance, my prayer would not be to restore my leg but to help me make the best of my condition, and to be thankful for life and opportunities to be a blessing to others. At the moment, we are monitoring the status of my cancer, and my prayers about my own health are similar to this.”
“Faith: A Journey for All”
In 2015, Mr. Carter said he was feeling unwell while monitoring elections in Guyana. When he returned to Georgia, doctors found a small mass on his liver, which turned out to be malignant.
After the mass was removed, doctors discovered that the cancer had spread to his brain.
The prognosis was grim, particularly given his age at the time, 90. But he began an aggressive treatment regimen for metastatic melanoma that included a drug that had been approved only months before he started on it.
Four months later, he announced at Sunday school that scans showed he was free of the disease.
Mr. Carter with his mother, Lillian Carter, in 1976.
“When other members of my family realized that they had a terminal illness, the finest medical care was available to them. But each chose to forgo elaborate artificial life-support systems and, with a few friends and family members at their bedside, they died peacefully.”
“The Virtues of Aging,” published in 1998
Mr. Carter’s understanding of mortality was anything but abstract.
His father, brother and two sisters died of pancreatic cancer. His mother, Lillian Carter, died of breast cancer. She was 85 when she died, but Mr. Carter noted that the others had died at relatively young ages — his father, James Carter Sr., was 59; his sister Gloria was 64; his sister Ruth was 54; and his brother, Billy, was 51.
His grandson, Jeremy, died in 2015 of a heart attack at the age of 28.
Mr. Carter recounted how his brother and mother kept their sense of humor, even as they suffered. He also admired the unflagging faith of his sister Ruth, an evangelist and spiritual healer.
Mr. Carter, center, at a funeral service at Arlington National Cemetery in 1996.
“If our doctors tell us that we have a terminal illness and can expect to live only another year, or five years, how would we respond? In fact, we confront exactly the same question if we are still healthy and have a life expectancy of fifteen or twenty more years.”
“The Virtues of Aging”
In his final years, Mr. Carter had become a source of inspiration to many — and of frustration and worry for those closest to him — for the stubbornness in how he pressed ahead with his work, despite his illness and age.
In 2019, he was bruised and bandaged with a black eye after a fall at home, yet hours after the fall, he was in Nashville, helping to assemble porches on homes being built by Habitat for Humanity. A few weeks later, after fracturing his pelvis in another fall, family members and aides were adamant that he should cancel his Sunday school lesson. He perched himself before the congregation and did it anyway.
That resilience was apparent again after the Carter Center announced in February 2023 that he had entered hospice care. Many believed the end was rapidly approaching. Yet, once again, Mr. Carter defied others’ expectations. He celebrated another anniversary with his wife, Rosalynn, in July of that year, and his 99th birthday in October.
When Mrs. Carter died in November 2023 at the age of 96, Mr. Carter attended her funeral services, which was a display of his frailty as well as the strength of his devotion to his wife and his resolve to be there for her.
Mr. Carter at a prayer service at Washington National Cathedral in 1979.
“Perhaps the most troubling aspect of our later years is the need to face the inevitability of our own impending physical death. For some people, this fact becomes a cause of great distress, sometimes with attendant resentment against God or even those around us.”
“The Virtues of Aging”
Aging is difficult. That’s true even for a former president with access to the best medical care and the constant support of staff.
Well into his 90s, Mr. Carter continued trotting around the world, teaching, writing and keeping up with his hobbies, including bird watching. But eventually, time caught up with him. The coronavirus pandemic pinned him down even more. He spent his final years with Mrs. Carter in the same modest home where he’d lived for decades.
In Plains, the tiny Georgia town where Mr. Carter’s house was just off the main road, his death was the cause of deep sadness. But there was a twinge of another sentiment, not quite relief but something close to it — a feeling that after such a long, productive and varied life, he had earned his rest.
His death created a void in the world, in his community, in his family, according to many who knew him and many others connected to him only through his legacy. Despite that, many in Plains also believed that his death was not an end but a transition to the eternal life that he remembered the pastor preaching about.
That’s what he believed, too."
Jimmy Carter Carved a New Mold for Ex-Presidents - The New York Times
Holding the ‘Title of Citizen,’ Carter Carved a New Mold for Ex-Presidents
"Jimmy Carter redefined what a president can do after departing the White House, leaving a lasting imprint through his work overseas, particularly in the realm of public health.
President Jimmy Carter had no idea what he was going to do next when he delivered his farewell address to the nation in January 1981. Defeated after a single term by Ronald Reagan, he simply told Americans that he would leave the White House and “take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president — the title of citizen.”
Forty-four years later, there is little question among historians that Citizen Carter carved a new mold for life after the Oval Office and that his post-presidency was the most consequential in modern history. But his impact was felt more strongly overseas than at home — especially in the realm of public health.
One of Mr. Carter’s biggest and most lasting post-presidential accomplishments is also one of the most overlooked: the near total eradication of Guinea worm disease, a painful parasitic infection for which there is no treatment or vaccine. In 1986, it afflicted an estimated 3.5 million people, mostly in Africa and Asia. There were only seven reported cases through the first 10 months of 2024, according to the Carter Center, Mr. Carter’s human rights organization.
Mr. Carter first saw the devastating effects of the disease in 1988, in two villages near Accra, Ghana. “Once you’ve seen a small child with a two- or three-foot-long live Guinea worm protruding from her body, right through her skin, you never forget it,” he later wrote in The Washington Post.
Mr. Carter wrote books, 32 in all, and devoted his energies to advancing global health, democracy and human rights. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He once said the world’s biggest problem was violence against women and girls, and he cited religious texts as a leading cause. He helped ensure free and fair elections in countries from Nicaragua to Nepal.
His personal diplomacy sometimes rankled. In 1994, with the assent of President Bill Clinton, he traveled to North Korea to avert a nuclear crisis, then irked the White House by announcing a deal with the North Korean leader, Kim Il-sung, live on CNN. He visited Cuba and met with Fidel Castro, drawing criticism that he was a “shill” for Mr. Castro’s dictatorship. He infuriated Israel and American Jews by likening Israel to an apartheid state.
Other former presidents have pursued post-presidential careers. John Quincy Adams, the nation’s sixth president, served in Congress after losing re-election in 1828. William Howard Taft, the 27th president, became the Supreme Court’s chief justice. Mr. Carter took a fresh path, said one of his biographers, Julian E. Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University.
“He just used that space you have as an ex-president — he’s not on the court, he’s not in Congress — and he figured out, over decades, how to use the stature to pursue ideas and policies that he thought were not getting enough attention,” Mr. Zelizer said. “No one looks at the post-presidency now as kind of a dead period where you don’t do anything.”
Yet the early days of Mr. Carter’s post-presidential life were a kind of dead period. He was depressed, said another of his biographers, Kai Bird, and had “no grand plan” beyond moving back to Plains, Ga., the tiny town where he had grown up and established himself as a peanut farmer before becoming the state’s governor.
He was 56 when he departed the White House, younger than many of his predecessors. He told a reporter that he figured then that he had about 25 years left. He threw himself into writing his memoir, Mr. Bird said.
“He was really expecting to be re-elected; he was always self-confident and optimistic about that,” Mr. Bird said. “So he was kind of shocked when he lost.”
A turning point came in October 1981, when President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt was assassinated.
In perhaps the high point of his presidency, Mr. Carter had brokered a historic peace treatybetween Mr. Sadat and the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, in 1979. Mr. Carter had been close to Mr. Sadat. The murder shook him, said the historian Douglas Brinkley, who chronicled that period in his 1998 book, “The Unfinished Presidency.”
“He told me that if Sadat gave his life for peace in this broken world, then I have to dedicate my post-presidency to keeping peace alive,” Mr. Brinkley said.
According to Carter Center lore, Mr. Carter’s plan to carry out that mission came to him in the middle of the night. Ordinarily a sound sleeper, he woke up, startling his wife, Rosalynn Carter, who asked if he was ill. No, he said. He presented her with the idea of a center that would focus on conflict resolution.
Together, they founded the Carter Center in partnership with Emory University in 1982. It sits on the hillside in Atlanta where the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman watched the city burn during the Civil War, and by 2023 had more than 3,000 employees around the globe.
In Plains, Mr. Carter was a familiar figure, known around town as “Mr. Jimmy,” who frequently taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church. After services, he and Mrs. Carter would wait patiently as visitors lined up to shake their hands.
Likewise, his overseas work was infused with what Mr. Brinkley called his “onward Christian soldier modus operandi, that he is here in life to mend a troubled world.”
In 2002, Mr. Carter visited four African nations as AIDS was still ravaging the continent. Antiviral drugs were not yet widely available there; a whole generation was being wiped out.
In South Africa, he and Nelson Mandela, the country’s former president, cradled babies who were infected with H.I.V., or whose mothers were — part of their effort to destigmatize the disease. In Nigeria, he met commercial sex workers, who told him they needed condoms to keep themselves safe.
After seeing the women, Mr. Carter preached at the Catholic church attended by the Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo. Dr. Helene D. Gayle, an AIDS expert who was with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at the time, recalled the former president giving a blunt talk to the congregation, in terms that would resonate with a Christian audience.
“He spoke very plainly about sex with and without a condom, the importance of it, that as a Christian, one should be thinking about one’s responsibility to each other,” said Dr. Gayle, now the president of Spelman College. She added that Mr. Carter also urged men “to think about their behaviors,” while speaking from the pulpit in a “beautiful and candid way.”
Mr. Carter once called his post-presidency “a liberation from mandatory duties” — a kind of second term, albeit one that turned out to be 11 times as long as the first.
Freed from the need to court voters, Mr. Carter sought to finish some of the work he started when he was president, including his push for peace in the Middle East. His 2006 book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” which prompted a backlash, was aimed at prodding the administration of President George W. Bush to take a more aggressive leadership role.
At home, he became known as a high-profile supporter of Habit for Humanity, the nonprofit group that seeks to build more affordable housing. In places as diverse as rural Georgia and Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Mr. Carter volunteered to do construction work well into his 90s.
Mr. Carter dipped gingerly back into politics in 2014, helping raise money for his grandson Jason Carter, a Democratic state senator in Georgia who was running for governor. During an interview in Plains that year, the elder Mr. Carter said he had vetted campaign strategists for his grandson and took a jab at the Republican incumbent, Nathan Deal, whose leadership he called “abominable.”
But he largely stayed off the campaign trail. In Georgia, he acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times, there were still many people who “look with great disfavor on my administration as governor and president.”
Mr. Carter’s early vision for the Carter Center was to solve conflicts around the world, but he quickly turned his attention to global health. He chose Dr. William Foege, who had helped lead the global effort to eradicate smallpox and ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when Mr. Carter was president, to be the center’s first executive director. Together, they moved to tackle Guinea worm disease and, later, other neglected tropical diseases, including river blindness and schistosomiasis, also known as snail fever.
Guinea worm disease is a gruesome infection, passed through contaminated water, in which people unknowingly ingest tiny fleas harboring worm larvae, which grow into two-foot-long worms inside the body before escaping the infected person’s skin, causing excruciating pain. Without a treatment or vaccine, some experts thought it would be impossible to eradicate; doing so required behavioral changes, such as teaching villagers to filter their drinking water through cloth.
But Mr. Carter “was willing to take a gamble,” said Dr. Donald R. Hopkins, who led an eradication campaign at the C.D.C. and joined the Carter Center in 1987. “He understood instinctively that people are interested in improving their own lives.”
He was hands-on. He went to Nigeria and Ghana, Dr. Hopkins said, to see the effects of the disease up close. He traveled to Delaware to ask leaders of DuPont to donate a type of nylon fiber that could be woven into cloth filters, and to a West Virginia factory that did the weaving. He talked chemical company executives into donating a pesticide to kill the larvae.
In 2015, when he was 90, Mr. Carter visited the staff of CARE, an international humanitarian organization based in Atlanta. It was then run by Dr. Gayle; she remembered that about an hour into his talk, he indicated that he had somewhere else to go, not letting on that he was headed to see his doctor.
The next day, Mr. Carter held a news conference to disclose that cancer had been removed from his liver but had also been found in his brain. He spoke about his born-again Christian beliefs and said he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes.” He said he would get his first radiation treatment that afternoon and would cut back on his Carter Center activities.
But something else was on his mind. “I would like to see Guinea worm completely eradicated before I die,” he told reporters. “I’d like for the last Guinea worm to die before I do.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg covers health policy for The Times from Washington. A former congressional and White House correspondent, she focuses on the intersection of health policy and politics. More about Sheryl Gay Stolberg"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)