I often think of an alternative timeline in which the manufacturers of slide rules spent fortunes demonising and smearing the pocket calculator… or the barons of the great hemp, cordage, and sailmaking firms tried to hold back the incursion of internal combustion engines into the shipping business.

That is just how futile and stupid this seems to me.

I guess the difference is that no other industry has ever been so huge, so central, so heavily subsidized by governments, so deeply infiltrated into governments. The fossil fuel industry is unique in human history in its reach, power, and resistance to change.