The Republican Reversal

Brian Balogh:
Today on the show, in light of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we’re looking at environmentalism: more specifically, how different people and policies have shaped efforts at protecting the environment.

Ed Ayers:
And just as Dennis Hayes mentioned, a big change in environmentalism happened between the end of the 1970s into the 1980s. It’s a shift that altered the course of environmentalism in American politics for decades after. So on today’s program, we’re going to focus exclusively on how that change played out during the 1980s.

Brian Balogh:
You’ll hear about the birth of the environmental justice movement in a rural county in North Carolina.

Ed Ayers:
And you’ll learn about what led the Reagan Administration to act on one of the biggest environmental issues of the decade. But first we want to bring you back to that shift that Dennis Hayes talked about in the 1980s.

Brian Balogh:
And to do so, I got in touch with Jay Turner. He teaches environmental studies at Wellesley and is a co-author of the Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump. In the book, Jay and his co-author Andrew Isenberg note that the 1970s was seen as the environmental decade. So I asked him, “How then should we see the 1980s?”

Jay Turner:
Yeah. It’s amazing how quickly things can sometimes change, right? You go back and you read 1972 and you read the Republican Party’s platform, they’re emphasizing their commitment to the environment and positioning themselves as leaders and ahead of the Democrats on the issue and really chiding a Democratically-led Congress for not keeping up with the Nixon Administration. Jump ahead a decade the story is completely different. Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail really called into the question and the urgency of environmental issues, described the regulations that had been put into place… many of them put into place by the Nixon Administration… as being prime examples of over-regulation and really calling for a fundamental shift that put the economy ahead of environmental protection as if those two things are entirely at loggerheads.

Brian Balogh:
You’ve coined the phase… it’s the title of your book… the Republican reversal, and certainly you argue that Ronald Reagan marked the beginning of this reversal. Can you expand on what you mean by that Republican reversal?

Jay Turner:
A big piece of it is reminding people that there was this moderate Republican tradition that wasn’t just about Nixon. It was also about lots of folks who were in the US Senate, people like John [Jaffey 00:13:28] from Rhode Island, who were core supporters of laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Today I think most people’s starting point is that the dividing lines on environmental issues are clear with Democrats pushing for reform and protection and Republicans often pushing back against that. The Republican reversal really signals to people that we’re in a very different place than we were when there was so much more bipartisan cooperation and work together on these issues in the late 1960s and the 1970s.

Brian Balogh:
Could you describe some of the deeper economic and structural changes that might’ve led to a shift in the Republican Party?

Jay Turner:
Yeah. Thinking about that jump from Nixon to Reagan, there’s a lot that happens in the 1970s and a lot that happens with the economy and with energy and new concerns both about economic slow down and uncertainty in the oil markets. The conflicts in the Middle East and the changes in the oil industry starting in 1973 and then later in the 1970s, it really started to shake people’s confidence both in the economy but also the abundance of resources and the abundance of energy. Suddenly environmental laws that were very much focused on protecting public health and the environment seemed like impediments to economic growth and limiting access to energy, and that was one of the big points that Reagan emphasized as he came into office: the need to unleash the nation’s energy resources and restart its economy.

Brian Balogh:
It seems like another factor… and you tell me if I’m wrong… was changing attitudes about expertise and science. Particularly within the Republican Party, was there a shift in the way that science was regarded?

Jay Turner:
I think you’re right. There is absolutely a reposition of the Republican Party with respect to science, and it’s a repositioning that gains momentum over time. I think there are elements of it in the Nixon Administration but also a lot of respect for the concern about the warming that scientists were bringing, about issues of air pollution and water pollution and endangered species that informed laws that were rigorous, science-based laws that required scientific review on a periodic basis and put scientific considerations ahead of economic considerations. So in the 1970s the role of scientific expertise was central to these early environmental laws.

Jay Turner:
That begins to fray, and in part it frays in the 1980s with the Reagan Administration, and then kind of the big environmental issue that was always on the front page on the headlines was acid rain: how to reduce emissions from power plants that contributed to acid rain. The Reagan Administration really dragged its feet on that and didn’t take up the warnings that scientists were raising and called them into question. I think that’s one piece of this puzzle, but it’s one that gains much more momentum as we move into the 1990s and on towards present.

Brian Balogh:
Does the Cold War, ideas of American exceptionalism… Does any of that come into this Republican reversal that you talk about?

Jay Turner:
One of the things that Reagan emphasized time and time again was how exceptional this country was and how that exceptionalism really hinged on that notion of abundance, natural resources, and the unlimited potential of the American people and the American economy. He really put that in opposition to environmental laws and the environmental regulations. When I think of why we chose Reagan as the turning point for the Republican reversal, especially in the context of contemporary politics in the Trump Administration, it’s because in many ways Trump is the culmination of the ideas and many of the policy initiatives that Reagan set into motion back in the early 1980s.

Brian Balogh:
So give us some specific examples of the early Reagan Administration’s efforts to either roll back existing regulations or open up opportunities for unregulated mining or drilling for oil.

Jay Turner:
So examples from the start of the Reagan Administration… One area, one priority, for the administration was expanding access to oil, gas, and coal on the public lands, so secretary of the interior, James Watt… I guess one of the political cartoons that I remember from that era is Watt running with a surfboard to a beach and the beach is covered with oil derricks and Watt’s yelling, “Surf’s up!” Those are the kinds of policies that the administration pushed, were ones that would make it easier and expedite development of fossil fuel resources on the public lands. The largest source of coal in the United States has been the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, and it was James Watt and the Reagan Administration that played a key role in enabling the development of those coal fields.

Jay Turner:
Also, we were 10 years into the implementation of the Clean Air Act in the early 1980s, and there was a lot of concern about the requirements for reducing emissions, key pollutants, including lead, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, and the administration pushed back and slowed down the regulatory process, to impose limitations, and to require emitters, which were largely power plants and other major industry, slow down efforts to formalize regulations that would require them to reduce emissions.

Brian Balogh:
How did the public respond? Public opinion polls today suggest there’s still very strong support in general for clean water, clean air.

Jay Turner:
What stands out about the 1980s is, one, how aggressive the Reagan Administration’s policies were in opposition to environmental protection and the people that Reagan appointed to lead this environmental regulatory rollback: people like James Watt and Gorsuch, who was at the EPA, and Watt was at the Department of the Interior. But in the early 1980s there was a tremendous amount of public pushback against the Reagan Administration’s initiatives and there was a lot of concern amongst Republicans about the administration’s direction. I think the Reagan Administration pushed hard on these rollbacks right at the start of the administration and did not actually have a whole lot of success over three, four years in making the kind of fundamental changes that the administration aimed for. By the time that Reagan is looking to get reelected, some of his early appointees have been pushed out of the White House for mismanagement and corruption. The people he brought in halfway through his administration were moderates, and in fact one of them was Bill Ruckelshaus who had led the EPA at the start of the agency under the Nixon Administration.

Jay Turner:
So we saw the Reagan Administration dial back its environmental agenda and moderate it, and it never acted on that big issue of acid rain. That became George W Bush’s key environmental accomplishment. But the Reagan Administration did play a key role in negotiating the Montreal Protocol, which addressed the stratospheric ozone hole and its depletion during his second term.