HALF A CENTURY ago Republicans were leading the charge to clean up the environment. Richard Nixon prioritised de-smogging America, protecting endangered species and establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the country’s pollution regulator. But Tricky Dick’s environmentalism was complicated. The Watergate tapes capture a conversation from 1971 between the president (“You can talk to me in complete confidence, I can assure you”), Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca. The two auto executives allowed that some rules made sense (“The citizens of the US must be protected from their own idiocy”) but complained about the costs of complying. Nixon stammered his sympathies. Pollution was real, he argued, but he was “extremely pro-business” and, in fact, some environmentalists were “enemies of the system”.