https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation
* Aside, significant global warming became scientific consensus only sometime between 1979 and 1989. The global cooling thing above is wrong in that most scientists expected some warming and that it expects too much from science. It does connect to the fact there was real scientific debate at the time and not just denialism, it wasn't clear warming would be that much a problem.
This should not be a point against climate science - scientists aren't born with the correct climate model! It took time to get the modeling right, but once they did the predictions were completely accurate.
* I wonder how much investing in solar would have been worth it. The tech was carried over by a huge investment in semiconductors that helped silicone tech on the side. If you go back early you probably end up replicating it and that costs a lot? Or I could be wrong here.
* Wind tech was probably doable. You could have iterated over designs, material science was behind but not that much I think. Nuclear was reasonable too.
* CFLs were developed in the late 70s. One could have done an early version of banning incandescent lighting. Blue LED lightening weren't invented yet and took a breakthrough.
* Probably even more stringent fuel mandates. Electrical vehicles were in the future, you could have brought them forward by a decade or two, but in the 1980s they weren't an alternative, and I don't think in the 90s either?
* Of course, the US could have mandated solar water heaters where the climate allows.
We can imagine an alternate past where green tech was wind + nuclear, and lightening was CFLs.
It's difficult to understand now, but natural gas was viewed as something in short supply back then that had to be price controlled. Of course the causation was in the other direction: price controls led to shortage, and once those were removed enormous new sources of gas began to be uncovered, eventually leading to the fracking revolution. Today in the US natural gas is a colossus, having beaten down coal and nuclear.
I don’t think that’s incorrect even if you ascribe all of the era’s environmental decision making to energy scarcity.
Carter still set a goal of 20% renewable energy by 2020, and that still would have made a significant impact.
It seems obvious to me that environmental policy was in some part driven by concern for the environment itself, but that doesn’t change the simple statement that things would have been better if we’d followed it.