Climatic Change (2015) 132:157–171 165 oppose regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. As of 2012, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP America, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Total, Anadarko, Occidental, Hess, Devon, Apache, and Marathon all served on the Board of Directors of API (American Petroleum Institute 2012). In 2011 API brought suit with other parties against the EPA over its authority to regulate greenhouse gases, stating that BEPA professes to be 90 to 99 % certain that ‘anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are primarily responsible for ‘unusually high planetary temperatures’, but the record does not remotely support this level of certainty^ (Goldman and Rogerson 2013), a statement that flew in the face of the prevailing scientific consensus (IPCC 2007). Peabody Energy and ExxonMobil serve on the corporate leadership BEnterprise Council Bof ALEC, and Chevron, Shell, and ConocoPhillips are members of ALEC’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force. This task force is the source of ALEC’s model legislation aimed at repealing renewable energy standards and regional climate policy initiatives in US states. ALEC characterizes climate change on its website as Ba historical phenomenon^ for which Bthe debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions^ (American Legislative Exchange Council 2010, 2014; SourceWatch 2014). Industrial carbon producers have done all this not only to be able to exploit existing reserves of oil, gas, and coal, but also to develop new ones. The depletion of older, accessible forms of oil and gas has led industry to develop new oil fields in technologically difficult and environmentally risky environments such as the deep Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, and the Arctic. It has also led them to explore for and develop more carbon intensive unconventional fossil resources such as tight oil, with associated increases in emissions from flaring; thermal enhanced oil recovery, with increased emissions associated with producing steam, and oil sands, with increased emissions associated with extraction, upgrading and refining (Brandt et al. 2010). The oil and gas industry has also been dramatically expanding production of natural gas from shales in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere (Council of Canadian Academies 2014). These activities are consistent with the assumption that there will be no substantial constraints on the production and use of fossil fuels in the near to medium term, and with the determination to ensure that there will be no such constraints. If the industrial carbon producers had accepted the need for a substantial price or cap on carbon, they would have made different business bets. Instead, they engaged in a set of activities designed to prevent the implementation of any substantial constraint on carbon, and they did so in part by repeatedly misrepresenting the state of scientific knowledge. 6 What are the industrial carbon producers doing now? Some fossil fuel companies continue today to reject the scientific evidence—to insist that the scientific jury is still out—and that their products represent a good solution to the world’s energy needs. Peabody Energy, for example, declares on its website that Bthe greatest crisis society confronts is not a future environmental crisis predicted by computer models, but a human crisis today that is fully within our power to resolve … with coal^ (Peabody Energy 2014). Other companies are turning to climate science to help them design Bclimate resilient^ measures to maintain and even expand production in the face of hazards posed by thawing permafrost, rising seas, changing storm patterns, and acidifying oceans (IPIECA 2013). They