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43 Regulation 46 (2020-2021)
Conservative Ideology and the Environment

handle is hein.journals/rcatorbg43 and id is 116 raw text is: 46 / Regulation / SUMMER 2020 Conservative Ideology and the Environment 4 REVIEW BY JONATHAN H. ADLER n 1970 a Republican president, Richard Nixon, created the Envi- ronmental Protection Agency through executive order. Less than 50 years later, a member of Nixon's party, Rep. Matt Gaetz, would introduce legislation to eliminate the EPA entirely. Whereas Nixon saw the need to embrace environmental protection for electoral advantage, 2016 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump called the EPA's work a disgrace and campaigned against the wastefulness of environmental regulation. 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 legis- lation 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 mea- sures 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 ush- ered 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, Republi- can 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 regula- tory state. Republican legislators were not simply bought off by corporate interests, they argue. Rather, the alignment of par- ticular 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 organi- zations that opposed regulations restrict- ing resource development, there is also a strong grass-root opposition to federal environmental regulation. Up through the 1970s, Republicans generally shared the belief that environ- mental problems required urgent govern- ment intervention, accepted the profes- sional 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 Republi- cans 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 regu- latory costs became more apparent, it was natural that some would view additional regulation as a bad deal. In their account, the Trump admin- istration's environmental agenda repre- JONATHAN H. ADLER is Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law. SAM BATKINS is director of strategy and research at Mastercard. The views expressed in his review are his own. IKE BRA NNON is a senior fellow at the Jack Kemp Foundation. ART CARDEN is associate professor of economics at Samford University and a senior fellow with the American Insti- tute for Economic Research. JORGE GONZALEZ-GALLARZA HERNANDEZ is an associate researcher at Fundaci6n Civismo, a free-market think tank in Madrid, Spain. DAVID R. HENDERSON is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and emeritus professor of economics at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He was a senior econ- omist with President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. He is the editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (Liberty Fund, 2008). He blogs atEconlog. GEORGE LEEF is director of research for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. PIERRE LEMIEUX is an economist affiliated with the Department of Management Sciences of the Universit6 du Quebec en Outaouais. He blogs at Econlog. VERN McKINLEY is a visiting scholar at the George Washington University Law School and coauthor with James Freeman of Borrowed Time: Two Centuries ofBooms, Busts and Bailouts atCiti (Harper- Collins, 2018). PETER VAN DOREN is editor of Regulation and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

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