The Conservative Argument for Environmental Protection

(SeaPRwire) –   One early morning during a recent business trip to Los Angeles, I walked out of my hotel and breathed deeply of the fresh air. The San Gabriel Mountains stood crisp against a bright winter sky. That small joy is a privilege: clean air, a clear view of the horizon, sunlight that doesn’t call for a coat of sunscreen. Only a generation before, Los Angeles was the world’s smog capital.

Part of why that’s no longer the case goes back to Republican President Richard Nixon, who signed the Clean Air Act in 1970. Actually, three of the most severe environmental emergencies the U.S. has dealt with over the past 100 years—city smog, the ozone layer hole, and acid rain—were tackled while Republicans were in charge.

That’s why last month’s announcement by the Trump administration to rescind the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding (the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions) is so shocking. Rescinding this finding isn’t just a change in policy—it’s a break from the traditional meaning of conservatism in America.

The decision was praised as the biggest deregulatory move in U.S. history. But in reality, it’s a refusal to take responsibility, a rift with rural communities most at risk from climate change effects, and an abandonment of the conservative identity that shaped America’s environmental heritage.

This legacy includes Nixon’s Clean Air Act, President Ronald Reagan’s support for the Montreal Protocol in 1987, and President George H.W. Bush’s 1990 amendment to the Clean Air Act to establish a market-driven cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide—an idea later adopted in California under Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to control greenhouse gases.

This isn’t just a modern priority, either—for over 150 years, stewardship has been a core conservative value. In 1864, amid the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant Act. President Ulysses S. Grant founded Yellowstone as the country’s first national park in 1872. President Theodore Roosevelt preserved around 230 million acres of public land and created the U.S. Forest Service.

These weren’t minor successes—they were global, systemic, civilization-altering triumphs. They happened because conservative leaders believed in stewardship, accountability, and the principle that safeguarding Americans from harm is a fundamental government duty.

Nowadays, the stakes are as high as they can get. Misinformation and distractions around climate change have pushed the issue to the edges of national discussion, even though the communities most affected by its outcomes are the same ones that helped elect this administration.

Climate change isn’t an abstract danger to conservative America—it hits directly at the core of the issues Republicans claim to value most.

Consider immigration: as equatorial areas become hotter and drier, climate-related migration will speed up. The already significant political issue of southern border pressures will get worse as millions are driven north by forces no wall can block.

Or think about rural and farm economies. The U.S. is becoming hotter, drier, and more unpredictable. In many parts of the Midwest and South, key crops for red-state economies—corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton—are already seeing regional yield drops due to worsening heat and drought. Meanwhile, the administration’s crackdown on clean energy has frozen billions in investments in the states that would have gained the most. In 2025 alone, over 24,000 jobs and almost $20 billion in clean energy projects in Republican districts were scrapped or left unfinished.

Then there’s America’s long-term competitiveness. China isn’t waiting for us to fix our political divisions. They’re creating the world’s first “electrostate,” using clean energy dominance the way we once used oil. They didn’t come up with the strategy—they took it from us. The difference is China is acting on it while we argue over whether the problem exists at all. When a 100% tariff makes a $15,000 BYD electric car cost $30,000, Americans don’t realize how far ahead China is, but the rest of the world does.

For 150 years, conservatives viewed the American landscape as a trust—something to care for, enhance, and pass down. That trust is now at risk, not because the problems are insurmountable, but because the movement that once solved them has been manipulated.

The way forward isn’t to reinvent conservatism, but to recall its roots—to go back to the values that built our parks, cleared our skies, and showed that environmental stewardship isn’t a partisan effort but a patriotic one.

The future will belong to the countries that lead the clean energy age. It should be America. And it can be, if conservatives take back the tradition that once made them the nation’s best stewards.