On January 17, 2007, world-renowned scientists stood with national evangelical leaders in Washington, D.C., to deliver an urgent call to action to President George W. Bush. This unprecedented alliance of science and religion had come together to warn that humans were destroying the community of life on which all living things on Earth depend. They declared, “Business as usual cannot continue yet one more day.”

Yet business as usual did continue, day after day, month after month, and year after year during a crucial window of opportunity to avert planetary heating when George W. Bush, a former oilman, sat as president of the United States. The climate politics of his administration reflect more than the ordinary corruption that weaves in and out of U.S. history like fraying threads on a flag. Instead, this saga shows a complete breakdown of environmental law amid a crisis so severe that the tenure of just one president could leave ecological wreckage. Bush’s failure to uphold environmental law, and Obama’s subsequent climate complacency, set the stage for virtually all of the themes in this book. More than any other story of regulatory failure, this one portrays the need for a transformative paradigm shift to hold government accountable for protecting the people’s natural assets.