On Earth Day, it’s good to remember that in ‘07, ‘08 and ‘09, we had lots of good bipartisan climate legislation in the Senate and a Republican presidential nominee with a solid climate platform.

Until January 21, 2010 when the infamous 5-4 Citizens United decision presented unlimited political spending, indeed unlimited anonymous political spending, to the fossil fuel industry, which instantly used that new power to corrupt our politics.

Bipartisanship on climate stopped dead then, and we lost a decade to fossil fuel fake science, dark money and phony front groups. They built a whole apparatus — the Web of Denial — so they could lie, cheat and bully on an industrial scale. It worked.

The fossil fuel industry lives off of a subsidy measured by the International Monetary Fund at north of $600 BILLION per year in the U.S., which gives the industry a massive incentive for corrupting our politics. In Citizens United, the “Roberts Five” gave them the tools.

We can make an Earth Day promise to reclaim a healthy Earth by reclaiming a healthy politics: expose and throw out the crooked dark money and fake science and phony front group apparatus, and restore democracy that works again.

Corrupting America’s government was nearly as evil as polluting our planet and oceans; it must be stopped.