William S. Becker, the executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former Department of Energy official, discusses the fossil fuel industry "cartel" that has aligned itself with congressional Republicans and the Trump administration to frustrate concerted policies in response to the threat from climate disruption.

"It's a huge industry. It's got a tremendous sunk investment," Becker observes. "It's been around for 200 years. It's fighting to keep access to something on the order of, well, tens of trillions of dollars of fossil fuels that are still underground. Science is saying that about two thirds of them have to stay there in order to keep climate change under some bearable level, at some bearable level. So it began late in 1989, the fossil energy industries and companies formed a coalition to begin resisting climate science and discrediting it, and we've been at this ever since."

Support the show