After four years of U.S. progress on efforts to deal with climate change under Joe Biden, Donald Trump’s return to the White House is swiftly swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction.

On his first day back, Trump declared a national energy emergency, directing agencies to use any emergency powers available to boost oil and gas production, despite U.S. oil and gas production already being near record highs and leading the world. He revoked Biden’s orders that had withdrawn large areas of the Arctic and the U.S. coasts from oil and natural gas leasing. Among several other executive orders targeting Biden’s pro-climate policies, Trump also began the process of pulling the U.S. out of the international Paris climate agreement—a repeat of a move he made in 2017, which Biden reversed.

None of Trump’s moves to sideline climate change as an important domestic and foreign policy issue should come as a surprise.

During his first term as president, 2017-2021, Trump repealed the Obama-era Clean Power Plan for reducing power plant emissions, falsely claimed that wind turbines cause cancer, and promised to “end the war on coal” and boost the highly polluting energy source. He once declared that climate change was a hoax perpetuated by China.

Since being elected again in November, Trump has again chosen Cabinet members who support the fossil fuel industry.

But it’s important to remember that while Donald Trump is singing from the Republican Party songbook when it comes to climate change, the music was written long before he came along.

In 1979, the scientific consensus that climate change posed a significant threat to the environment, the economy, and society as we had come to appreciate them began to emerge.

The Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate, commissioned by the U.S. National Research Council’s climate research board, concluded then that if carbon dioxide continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, there was “no reason to doubt that climate changes will result.” Since then, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by about 25%, and temperatures have risen........

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