As is commonly observed, support for federal environmental regulation used to be a bipartisan enterprise. Most major environmental laws were adopted with broad, bipartisan majorities. In addition to creating the EPA, Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act into law. Another Republican president, George H.W. Bush, advocated for and signed the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, the most expansive environmental regulatory legislation in the nation’s history.
Today, however, federal environmental regulation is a highly partisan and divisive issue. Most of the major environmental statutes have not been reauthorized in decades, and new environmental measures are rarely considered. Democratic officeholders tend to endorse and advocate for more expansive federal environmental regulation, while GOP officeholders resist. There are exceptions, to be sure, but the overall tendency is clear. When President Trump took office, the rollback of federal environmental regulations—particularly those adopted under President Barack Obama—was at the top of his agenda. Indeed, the Trump administration has ushered in the most aggressive environmental deregulatory effort in the nation’s history, largely with Republican support.
Shifting ideology / What caused this change? Most explanations focus on the changes within the Republican Party, particularly increased hostility to federal environmental regulation. A common narrative is the GOP about-face is due to corporate influence, the fossil fuel industry in particular. Under this account, Republican officeholders have become beholden to coal barons, oil executives, and the filthy lucre of heavily polluting industries.
In The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump, historians James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg offer a more nuanced explanation of the Republican Party’s change on environmental policy, grounded in a shift in the party’s ideology. They point to three factors operating in concert: “rise of conservative ideology, the mobilization of interest groups and activists, and the changes in the environment and the regulatory state.” “Republican legislators were not simply bought off by corporate interests,” they argue. Rather, the alignment of particular economic interest groups with the Republican Party occurred in concert with changes within the conservative movement and the lived experience of those regulated by federal environmental laws. They write, “Big money alone does not fully explain the Republican embrace of the gospel of more.” While business groups—resource extractive industries in particular—certainly played a role by supporting candidates and organizations that opposed regulations restricting resource development, there is also a strong grass-root opposition to federal environmental regulation.
Up through the 1970s, Republicans generally shared the belief that environmental problems required urgent government intervention, accepted the professional expertise of scientists and others calling for environmental action, and thought it acceptable for government to intervene in the economy to protect the environment and public health. Over the past few decades, however, many Republicans have come to see many environmental claims as “alarmist and exaggerated,” have “dismissed professional expertise,” and see environmental regulations as economic burdens that constrain individual liberty. More broadly, as the perceived urgency of environmental problems ebbed and regulatory costs became more apparent, it was natural that some would view additional regulation as a bad deal.
In their account, the Trump administration’s environmental agenda “represen$$$$$ted a complete break with an older and equally important tradition of Republican environmentalism that dated back to the nineteenth century.” More broadly, the GOP’s environmental shift is “one of the most profound and far-reaching transformations in modern American political history.” Yet the account they provide suggests a more gradual evolution. As they acknowledge, President Ronald Reagan’s administration had an aggressive deregulatory agenda, much of it focused on environmental rules, but this was hardly the first time a Republican president had questioned the value of federal environmental regulation. Indeed, the Clean Water Act was enacted over Nixon’s veto.
Economic interests undoubtedly caused some industry leaders to support Republican politicians who promised a lighter regulatory touch, but this was as much an effect as a cause of changes in the party’s approach to environmental policy. As Turner and Isenberg observe, “The conservative turn in the Republican Party hinged on the ability of party leaders and politicians to fuse together social activists and business interests in common cause against big government.” At the same time, evolving Republican attitudes to environmental policy helped enlist new constituencies of voters, not just funders.
The growth of grassroots anti-regulatory organizations “made it clear that it was not only corporations, but workers, farmers, and ranchers, who were concerned about the implications of environmental policies that might curb resource extraction, farming practices, or consumer choices.” Landowners and small business owners were mobilized against environmental regulation not merely because of threats to their livelihoods, but also because their experience conflicted with their understanding of how government should treat the governed.
Turner and Isenberg recognize the role of actual ideology in this change. Indeed, part of their project is to situate the shift in Republican attitudes toward environmental regulation within the context of changing views about government and the evolution of conservatism. Any ideological commitment to limiting the size and scope of the federal government will necessarily conflict with much contemporary environmental policy. A general presumption underlying most discussions of environmental law is that the existence of environmental problems requires extensive government regulation, so if one opposes the latter, it becomes natural to question the former. “Republicans drew on conservative ideology to create a vision of an American economy that, if left unfettered by regulation, could be the engine not only of a higher standard of living but of technological solutions to environmental problems.”
Progress and skepticism / Turner and Isenberg do an admirable job identifying often-overlooked factors in the Republican Party’s evolution on environmental matters, yet it is quite clear where their sympathies lie. They understand that as environmental regulation became more costly and intrusive, disrupting not only particular industries but also the ways of life of workers and others dependent upon such industries, it also generated political opposition. What they fail to do, however, is cast much of a critical eye on the environmental policies the nation adopted or the evolution and increasingly partisan behavior of the organized environmental movement.
Insofar as the Republican turn against environmental regulation is reactive—and it certainly is—they show little appreciation for what it is conservatives may be reacting against. It is simply assumed that federal environmental regulation is desirable and opposition to environmental regulation necessarily translates into opposition to environmental protection.
It is certainly true, as a descriptive matter, that a “sense of urgency” helped propel the push for federal environmental regulation in the 1970s. Images of environmental ruin and expert predictions of population bombs and silent springs buttressed the nascent environmental movement’s political strength. But is it really true, as Turner and Isenberg claim, that the environmental laws of the 1970s were “enacted in response to a clear and present danger”? It certainly may have seemed that way to many at the time, but the historical record is less clear. It is incontrovertible that some environmental concerns were exaggerated, including by scientific experts. Some professional experts showed themselves to be professional alarmists. Is it any wonder that those whose livelihoods were threatened by the regulatory response to such alarms would learn to become skeptical?
One thing Turner and Isenberg fail to note is that for many of the environmental problems of greatest concern at the time, progress was already being made. State governments became increasingly aggressive on environmental regulation throughout the 1960s, upping investments in infrastructure and adopting conservation measures, with positive effects. California regulated automobile exhaust before the EPA even existed and urban air pollution concentrations had begun to decline before Nixon signed the Clean Air Act. Images of the Cuyahoga River catching fire may have lit the spark for a federal Clean Water Act, but the most famous of those images was from 1952 and key measures of water quality were improving before the Clean Water Act was passed. Indeed, recent research has found more rapid declines in key measures of water pollution before 1972 than after. Turner and Isenberg cite this study, but do not discuss this finding.
They don’t particularly engage with the broader dynamic of environmental politics and the role that inside-the-Beltway environmentalist organizations have played in making environmental policy a more partisan issue at the national level. The first President Bush is responsible for one of the greatest upticks in environmental regulation in the nation’s history, yet he received little organized environmental group support. It’s understandable that environmentalists opposed President George W. Bush’s efforts to reform federal air pollution regulations, but he never got much credit for aggressive marine conservation efforts.
At times, the authors exaggerate the partisan aspect of environmental battles or understate the role of environmental organizations in increasing the partisanship of environmental policy debates. As they note, the “Contract with America” endorsed by Republicans in 1994 placed a heavy emphasis on limiting regulatory burdens and protecting landowners and local governments from federal edicts. After Republicans took over the House of Representatives that year, Turner and Isenberg write, they “quickly put environmentalists and the Clinton administration on the defensive” by, among other things, placing “riders” on appropriations bills to limit environmental rules. In actuality, President Bill Clinton’s administration was put on the defensive two years earlier, when a bipartisan House majority first rejected the administration’s proposed grazing reforms and then turned on its proposed energy tax. Despite the ambitious plans of then–EPA administrator Carol Browner, the 103rd Congress made clear that federal environmental legislation could only pass with amendments limiting unfunded mandates, protecting property rights, and requiring benefit–cost analysis for new rules. What the authors characterize as a would-be “regulatory counterrevolution” had held bipartisan majority support the year before, when Democrats still controlled the House. Once Republicans were in charge, however, what were once common-sense bipartisan reforms could be characterized as a Republican assault on environmental protection.
This pattern has continued. Like Clinton, Obama was not able to get meaningful environmental legislation through Congress. Despite a significant Democratic majority in the House, a major climate change bill barely squeaked through, demonstrating “it was the opposition to, rather than support for, climate policy that was bipartisan.” At the time, Republicans were not alone in fearing the costs and intrusiveness of unleashing the EPA on carbon dioxide, the most ubiquitous byproduct of modern civilization. Yet, it was not only proposed climate solutions that provoked opposition; on the right there was increasing reluctance to recognize a problem. By the 2010s “climate has been transformed from an environmental or economic issue into a new front in the culture wars of the twenty-first century.” Here as elsewhere, conservatives knew what environmental policies they opposed, but could not identify proactive policies they could support
As the ideological and interest-group base has become more narrow and concentrated, it is inevitable that partisanship would increase.
Culture war / In their discussion of climate as elsewhere, Turner and Isenberg recognize that conservative opposition to emission reductions and alternative energy sources cannot be laid wholly at the feet of powerful economic interests. Such a blame game is “easy,” they write, but it ignores the more fundamental challenge posed by climate change policy: “not just reshaping the nation’s energy economy, but challenging an American culture that celebrates independence, abundance, and exceptionalism.” What at one time may have been characterized as a jobs-versus-environment debate has become just as much an “us-versus-them” fight. The debate is as much about “culture and values” as it is about science or economics—a dynamic Trump has learned to exploit.
It is not merely that Republicans became more conservative on environmental issues over time. The evolution of partisan attitudes toward environmental measures since the 1970s has been facilitated by partisan sorting. Earlier divisions on environmental measures divided Americans more by region or class than by party. Those who were once moderate, conservation-oriented Republicans from the Northeast have become Democrats, and western workers in resource-dependent industries who were once Democrats have become Republicans. In other words, it is not that the Democrats who helped defeat Clinton’s environmental initiatives have changed their policy views, as much as it is that they are no longer Democrats. Much the same can be said of conservation-oriented northeastern Republicans: they are no longer Republicans. And as the ideological and interest-group base has become more narrow and concentrated, it is inevitable that partisanship would increase.
The story Turner and Isenberg tell shows that the Republican agenda on the environment is, more than anything else, one of reaction. As they write in their conclusion:
Conservatives have managed to tie their environmental policy ideas to a set of values that many conservative Americans hold dear: a distrust of government, science, and secular intellectuals; and a faith in the market, technological innovation, and perhaps above all, in a God who has provided a cornucopia of resources for human use.
Yet there’s no reason those values must lead to an anti-environmental agenda, any more than environmental problems necessarily entail centralized regulatory responses. But crafting an environmental alternative to the conventional regulatory agenda takes effort and ingenuity, and may not lead to a meaningful electoral advantage.
Conservatism and conservation / What does the future hold? As Turner and Isenberg observe, the lack of environmental leadership in Washington, DC has not stopped environmental innovation at the state level. During the Clinton administration, state and local governments sought to innovate as a way to reduce the costs of environmental regulation. Under George W. Bush, states sought to innovate to fill the gap in environmental protection left by a more complacent EPA. This same dynamic continues today, as state policymakers seek political advantage by demonstrating environmental leadership on issues ranging from local conservation to global climate change. With Congress out of the business of enacting environmental legislation, many states have sought to develop the next generation of environmental policy themselves.
A persistent problem for right-leaning office-holders—and the policy intellectuals they draw upon—has been how to reconcile a skepticism of government regulation with an embrace of environmental protection. As they note, both Barry Goldwater and Reagan “struggled to reconcile their conservative ideals with the expanding role of government in protecting the environment.” This struggle remains today. Conservative officeholders are quick to embrace platitudes about the importance of market-oriented conservation, but often come up short with policy specifics. Right-leaning think tanks and policy shops devote more time and effort to attacking new regulatory initiatives (often with some justification) than to specifying the contours of a meaningful alternative. The federal environmental regulatory state is not going away without legislative action, and a market-oriented alternative to conventional regulation requires more than a one-sentence bill to eliminate the EPA.
Turner and Isenberg’s focus on the role of ideas is welcome and refreshing, particularly in comparison to the Manichean tales of sinister corporate influence that so often dominate this space. In recognizing the role of ideology, they open the door to greater consideration of the lived experience of environmental regulation that has influenced perceptions of such regulation’s desirability.
