"Climate change won't be that serious..." – "the lights will go out if we use renewable energy..." – "climate science is bent...". For a decade, contrarians controlled large swathes of the UK's political and media discourse on energy and climate change. But their time is coming to an end. As the record for the warmest year gets broken time after time, the cost of clean energy tumbles and public support for tackling climate change stays high, the lights are indeed going out for Britain's contrarian elite, in both politics and the media.
In Denied, the first book to take a serious look at the history of the UK's climate contrarians, former BBC science and environment correspondent Richard Black outlines how they and their canonical arguments came to such prominence – and how they lost.