That's a question I've asked myself more than once.
Well, the answer is roughly 1991 according to a new study.
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Chris Mooney over at Mother Jones explains more fully, but the fact is, it was during the uber-Republican Nixon administration that the nation's most important and enduring environemntal laws and agencies were established: The National Environemntal Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Nowadays, these laws and agencies -- and their roles in combating global climate change -- are the seethingly hated poster children of the "socialist threat" of climate change politics.
So what happened?
According to a new study in the journal Social Science Research, the key change actually began around the year 1991when the Soviet Union fell. "The conservative movement replaced the 'Red Scare' with a new 'Green Scare' and became increasingly hostile to environmental protection at that time," argues sociologist Aaron McCright of Michigan State University and two colleagues.
So what happened in the early 1990s?
For starters, Bill Clinton and Al Gore took office. Gore had just published his Earth in the Balance, and this was also when a new zest for attack politics took hold -- when tearing down anything and everything a Democrat president stood for became the raison d'etre of Republican strategists. Together, these things made environmental issues an important political tool in the right-wing toolkit. And since the "left," led by Gore, had staked out the pro-environment position, that meant Republicans had to de facto oppose it. At least in the fevered little brains of emerging righties like Karl Rove.
Throw in the influence of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit which seems to have scared the hell out of the xenophobe wing of the party, and add in the phenomenon of "party sorting" which helped strengthen and ossify American political ideologies, and you start to see how things went so very wrong.
Sadly, the result is that we probably have reached a point where political compromise on environmental issues is near-impossible. And that doesn't bode well for America's ability to deal effectively with the wide range of environmental problems, just when the need to do so is greater than ever.
