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successful in convincing naysayers about the latter as they were with the former. This is not due to any shortcomings in the scientific process: Evidence about the reality of global warming is far more overwhelming today than it was about the threat to the ozone layer in the mid-1980s. Nor have the experts failed to speak with one voice: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has delivered unimpeachably weighty assessments over the years, underlining its growing confidence about the science on climate change. But with climate the reactionary backlash has been unprecedentedly successful. It is almost forgotten now, but there was a denialist backlash against ozone regulation too, centered in the U.S. in the mid-1990s, which swayed some important politicians. But the ozone deniers never made the leap into the center of the political stage that the climate deniers have managed. Once again, I believe that America was a crucial force here: Denialism on climate change has been aggressively promoted by a variety of right-wing think tanks—many of them part-funded by the fossil fuels industry—whose ideologists in recent years have managed to position global-warming denial as a centrepiece ideological stance for the Republican Party. Copycat think tanks and ideologues, again almost exclusively on the libertarian political right, quickly sprouted up in other countries too.

Indeed, climate denialists became so successful in 2009 that they managed to dominate the media agenda via a series of manufactured scandals that engulfed much of the climate-science community. Deniers promoting the so-called “Climategate” affair took a few out-of-context quotes and superficially embarrassing private slips by leading scientists from some leaked emails and nearly managed to publicly discredit not only the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia but several other leading institutes too. Vociferous promoters of a subsequent scandal took a single mistake about Himalayan glaciers, buried deep in the second weighty tome of the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, and used it to attack the entire IPCC process, and the role of Chair Rajendra Pachauri in particular. None of this changed anything we knew—anything that mattered—about the reality of climate change, but the deniers succeeded in making climate science an ideological battleground, where the expert consensus was rejected by whole political parties and large sections of the media as itself partisan.

The failure of climate policymaking has been a self-reinforcing process. Industry carries much of the blame for entrenching itself in a position that for too long opposed political action. With the all-important political tipping point not crossed, companies that had begun to reposition for the post-carbon age instead began to fall back into their old roles. For example BP, which for a few years rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum” and flirted with solar power, moved strongly back into fossil fuels, even investing heavily in oil extraction in the dirty Canadian tar sands. Of course, it is also important to recognize that moving out of fossil fuels was always going to be orders of magnitude harder than disavowing CFCs—oil, coal, and gas provide most of the energy powering modern industrial civilization, rather than being important for just a small number of specific uses and processes. The companies invested in fossil fuel production are commensurately vastly more politically and economically powerful. Nor do oil and coal companies have much likely future in a clean-energy society. While DuPont, for which CFCs were only a small section of its business anyway, could reposition itself to make a fortune selling CFC substitutes, it is difficult to imagine any existing fossil fuels company making a serious contribution to decarbonizing our economy.

But, as I outlined in the previous chapter, I also believe the environmental movement is partly responsible for this ongoing failure by promoting an alignment of climate change mitigation with austerity, sacrifice, and high cost. By analogy,