Once upon a time, the mainstream Republican Party did not deny the reality of climate science and even saw the environment as something to be valued and protected, not exploited.
“They staged a coup… the fox was now guarding the hen house from that point forward. Energy and environmental policy, and the Republican Party, was controlled by polluters and they would not look back.”
This can be difficult to believe, much as it is hard to imagine that environmentalist presidents like Theodore Roosevelt (who conserved over 230 million acres of wilderness, at least for white people) and Richard Nixon (who originated the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA) actually identified as Republicans. As recently as the early 1990s, a Republican president (George H. W. Bush) was willing to sign landmark environmental legislation to clean up acid rain and amend the Clean Air Act.
