“A tree is a tree,” Ronald Reagan famously said in the midst of a pitched battle over logging rights. “How many more do you need to look at?” With Reagan’s arrival in the White House, and the ascendency of many think-tank ideologues to powerful positions in his administration, the goalposts were yanked to the right. Reagan filled his inner circle with pro-industry scientists who denied the reality of every environmental ill from acid rain to climate change. And seemingly overnight, banning and tightly regulating harmful industrial practices went from being bipartisan political practice to a
...more
