To Understand Trump's Climate Moves, Look to the Reagan Years
“There was this sense then – which I see now as well – that somehow having won the election, the decks are cleared,” Jonathan Lash, who was an environmental lawyer in the Reagan years, says on this week’s Zero.
Cardboard cutouts of former US President Donald Trump and former US President Ronald Reagan for sale at the Trump Town USA merchandise store in Boons Mill, Virginia.
Photographer: Al Drago/BloombergWithin hours of being sworn in for his second term in the White House, Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency and announced that the US would leave the Paris Agreement.
Trump likes to break precedents, but recent presidential history does offer some insight into what might be coming, particularly when it comes to energy and environmental policy. On Zero, Yale University historian Paul Sabin talks about how present-day Trump priorities – such as dismantling government agencies, questioning scientific expertise, and ramping up oil and gas production– were also pursued by the Reagan administration. But Jonathan Lash, who was an environmental lawyer in the Reagan years, also offers an important reminder that Reagan’s efforts to dismantle environmental protections had mixed results.