Lesson 26: The Environment, Energy and American Politics

On 22 April 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans took part in the first Earth Day — teach-ins, clean-ups and rallies across the country. Within months, Congress and President Nixon created a new environmental state: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established in December 1970, and the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 followed. Environmental protection, once a scattered concern, became a permanent part of American government — and a permanent subject of political argument.

The environmental decade

The 1970s laws were bipartisan in a way that later environmental legislation rarely was. The Clean Air Act set national air-quality standards and required the EPA to regulate major pollutants; the Clean Water Act aimed to make American waters fishable and swimmable; the Endangered Species Act protected species threatened with extinction and the habitats they depend on. These laws were responses to visible harms: smog over cities, rivers catching fire — Cleveland's Cuyahoga River famously burned in 1969 — and public alarm after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) linked pesticides to wildlife decline.

Other episodes exposed the costs of industrial waste. At Love Canal, New York, families were evacuated from homes built over a chemical waste site in the late 1970s, and the scandal helped drive the Superfund law of 1980 (the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act), which created a programme to clean up hazardous waste sites. The partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 halted the rapid expansion of nuclear power in the United States for decades, although no deaths were attributed to the accident by official investigations.

Energy shocks

Energy politics ran alongside environmental politics. In October 1973, Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo on the United States during the Arab-Israeli war, and petrol prices rose sharply, with queues at filling stations. A second shock followed the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Presidents responded differently: Carter promoted conservation, a national speed limit and solar energy, and created the Department of Energy in 1977; Reagan, elected in 1980, emphasised production and deregulation and removed solar panels from the White House roof. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, which released roughly 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound, led to the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.

Climate change enters politics

From the late 1980s, climate change moved from scientific journals into politics. The United States signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 but never ratified it. The Paris Agreement of 2015, which the United States joined, set a framework of voluntary national pledges; the United States withdrew in 2020 under President Trump and rejoined in 2021 under President Biden. In 2022 Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, whose climate and clean-energy provisions were described by the Biden administration and by many analysts as the largest American climate investment to date — a description the lesson attributes rather than endorses, since its long-run effects are still unfolding.

Debate continues over how far regulation, markets, technology or a combination of the three should drive change. Supporters of regulation point to cleaner air and water since 1970; critics point to compliance costs and argue that innovation and economic growth deliver environmental gains more reliably. The record of the 1970s laws — substantial reductions in several major air pollutants even as the economy grew — is a central piece of evidence in that debate, cited by both sides in different ways.

Why it matters

Environment and energy policy shows American federalism at work: Washington sets standards, states implement them, courts interpret them, and markets and technology reshape what is possible. Few issues illustrate better how a problem can move from protest to law — and back to argument.