The GOP Playbook for Sabotaging Environmental Regulations

The devastation throughout the southeastern United States in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton has laid bare the importance of strong climate policy, including adaptation and mitigation measures. This is especially true because the sheer extent of the damage in states like North Carolina was preventable, exacerbated knowingly by business-friendly conservative politicians.

As investigative reporting from the Lever revealed, North Carolina regulators put forth a Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan in 2020 that emphasized the threat of climate change, but Republican lawmakers instead passed a bill to remove home sheathing requirements, which could have protected thousands of homes from destruction.

The investigation follows how state Republicans, starting in 2010, stonewalled climate mitigation legislation and weakened the environmental regulations that had made North Carolina a climate leader among Southern states during the 2000s. This phenomenon is not unique to North Carolina, of course. Nor is it new. Across the country and in DC, lawmakers (and Supreme Court justices) in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry and other corporate interests have stood in the way of commonsense environmental policy for decades.

The strategy for undermining environmental protections has become predictable: gut agency budgets, push out scientific experts, hobble enforcement teams, and ignore climate data when making policy. The result is exactly what corporate polluters want — free rein to operate while regular people pay the price of worsening climate disasters.

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