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 He revoked Biden’s orders that had withdrawn large areas of the Arctic and the U.S. coasts from oil and natural gas leasing.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During his first term as president, 2017-2021, Trump repealed the Obama-era Clean Power Plan for reducing power plant emissions, falsely claimed that wind turbines cause cancer, and promised to “end the war on coal” and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.

Money, lies and lobbying

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 with it.

The report also concluded that land use changes and the burning of fossil fuels, both of which could be subject to regulation, were behind climate change and that a “wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late.”

But none of this came as a surprise to the oil industry. Working behind the scenes since the 1950s, researchers working for companies such as Exxon, Shell and Chevron had made their leaders well aware that the widespread use of their product was already causing climate change. And coinciding with the Ad Hoc Study Group’s work in the late 1970s, oil companies started making large donations to national and state-level candidates and politicians they viewed as friendly to the interests of the industry.

The oil industry also implemented a disinformation campaign designed to cast doubt about climate science and, in many cases, about their own internal research. The strategy, ripped from the pages of the tobacco industry playbook, involved “emphasizing uncertainty” to cast doubt on the science and calling for “balanced” science to sow confusion.

This strategy was helped by the creation and financial backing of lobbying organizations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Global Climate Coalition, both of which played central roles in spreading falsehoods and casting doubt on the scientific consensus about climate change.

By 1997, when 84 countries signed the Kyoto Protocol to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, the oil industry had built an effective apparatus for actively discrediting climate science and opposing policies a