 What they didn't do was tell the rest of us. Instead, they invested billions of dollars across this industry, building this architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that kept us locked for 30 years in a completely sterile debate about whether or not global warming was real, a debate that both sides knew the answer to at the beginning. It's just one of them was willing to lie. And it turns out to be the most consequential lie in human history because it cost us all that time.