Republican stance on climate change has devolved since Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush

We’ve all become inured to the pronouncements of prominent Republicans, including most of this year’s crop of presidential wannabes, regarding climate change. They’ve pretty much tracked the path that the propagandists at Heartland Institute, the Koch Industries and Exxon have laid out for them. That is, they’ve adopted some version of denying that climate change is happening or they concede that it’s happening but say it’s the natural order and that even if it isn’t nothing can be done about it.

‘Twas not always like this in the GOP. Eleven newly declassified memos from the Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies prove it. Joby Warrick at The Washington Post explains​:

The memos, stamped “confidential” and kept under wraps for years, portray a White House eager to assert U.S. leadership on climate change. Global warming will have “profound consequences,” one document warns, and the United States “cannot wait” until all scientific questions are resolved before taking action.[...]

A 1989 memo to then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III asserts that the United States should take a leadership role in the fight against a threat it calls “the most far reaching environmental issue of our time.” [...]

The memos reflect the moderate stance on climate change adopted by Republican leaders both in the White House and in Congress throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By contrast, many of today’s GOP successors to Bush and Reagan dispute the scientific consensus on man-made climate change and oppose efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

Of course, when it came to actually taking action on climate change, it was a different story. Although the Reagan administration made the United States the leader in getting the Montreal Protocol adopted to mandate a phase-out of ozone-eating chemicals, it also butchered the budget for renewable energy research and development that President Jimmy Carter had initiated.

Over the past 25 years, even though a few leading Republicans have not adopted an outright denier stance, the myopic policies they’ve supported and the ones they haven’t might as well have been dictated from Exxon HQ. Even those who don’t buy into the Jim Inhofe school of climate “thought” have gone along with the hard-liners when it’s time to vote. That’s why both the House and the Senate have approved resolutions (and 26 mostly Republican-led states have sued) to kill President Obama’s Clean Power Plan to reduce CO₂ emissions from new and existing power plants.

What the declassified memos demonstrate is that it’s possible for Republicans to break free from the string of lies with which climate-change charlatans such as the Kochs and their media marionettes have saturated public discourse. Possible, but improbable. They see with some clarity the crisis facing the bottom lines of fossil-fuel producers. But they remain blind to the depth and breadth of the climate crisis.