John Deutch recalls how Jimmy Carter left his mark on energy research

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By Jeffrey Mervis, Science. 

Excerpt: John Deutch ...joined President Jimmy Carter’s energy team shortly after the Georgia Democrat took office in January 1977. And for the next 3 years Deutch had a front-row seat to history as Carter, who died on 29 December 2024 at age 100, worked to make the country less dependent on imported oil and in the process reshaped the direction of federal energy research. ...Within 6 months Deutch would become the founding director of the Office of Energy Research at the newly created Department of Energy (DOE), the successor to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the short-lived Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA). ...Meeting DOE’s mandate also meant launching programs outside the legacy energy sources, notably fossil fuels and nuclear power, that had been the mainstay of DOE research under its predecessor agencies. ...Although the Carter administration tried hard to get people in the U.S. to conserve energy and to find alternatives to foreign oil, including putting solar panels on the White House, climate change was not a significant part of OER’s portfolio under Deutch. ...“But there was really no competence in that area within the department at the time,” he says. “And its importance was not yet clearly recognized except among a very restricted set of environmentalists.”... 

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