Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Concerns about energy and inflation, linked to a conservative trend in US politics, are beginning to eclipse the moral commitment to a clean and safe environment characteristic of the past decade. In the first of three articles on how this has happened and what may follow, David Dickson describes how the energy issue has become a major threat to US environmental movements.
