Gaslighting

Fighting the causes of increasingly catastrophic weather should never have become controversial. The investigative reporter Geoff Dembicki has written an engaging, enraging, and meticulously documented chronicle of how it did. This has been no ordinary corporate deception. Dembicki’s story reveals nothing less than the betrayal of our planetary future by the fossil fuel industry.

One point must be made at the outset. Right-wing politicians, operatives, and media commentators have certainly been complicit in a decades-long disinformation campaign on the contribution of fossil fuel consumption to anthropogenic global warming, or AGW. But, as Dembicki himself convincingly shows in The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change, that campaign was driven from the beginning by the wealthy and powerful companies themselves. The full title of the book, then, seems rather misleading.

The considerable evidence Dembicki cites...