All posts by Christopher Hepworth


  |  Environment  |   

I’ve enjoyed a relationship with the elephants of Zambia stretching back fifty years. As a child visiting Luangwa Valley, I was charmed by their gentle, playful personalities, their massive size and their intelligence. To encounter one of these majestic animals up close is an awe-inspiring experience.

It is a thrill that I would like my four children to experience before humanity persecutes these noble beasts to extinction. Our family will be travelling to Luangwa in July to see these elephants in their natural habitat in the heart of Africa. I am hoping my children will experience the same sense of awe that I did many years ago and become champions of elephant conservation.

I am not being melodramatic. Since I arrived in Zambia as a six-year-old boy, the elephant population has been decimated by poaching and the illicit ivory trade. In the 1960’s there were 250,000 elephants in Zambia. Now just 21,000 remain. In some parks such as Sioma Ngwezi in Zambia’s south west, an ‘elephant holocaust’ has reduced the once thriving elephant populations to less than fifty.

Elephant’s relationship with humanity has never been a happy one. The ten million elephants that once roamed Africa were always hunted by the local population, but it barely dented their numbers. But in the nineteenth century, the senseless slaughter by the colonial powers began. Hunting was the sport of ‘gentlemen’ and reputations were forged on the scale of the carnage they wreaked on Africa’s wildlife. The legendary scout Sir Fredrick Selous butchered 548 head of game in one trip to Bechuanaland (modern Botswana) including 24 elephants and 9 rhinos. Lord Delamere, (the lovable rogue mentioned in ‘Out of Africa’ and considered the leading settler of Kenya), ‘secured 14,000 pounds of ivory … by shooting elephant with a maxim gun’. By 1900 there were fewer than 6,000 elephants in the whole of Africa south of the Zambezi and none in the area now known as the Kruger National Park. Thankfully elephants have made something of a miraculous recovery in that region although the situation is dire in the rest of the continent.

The end of the colonial era provided no respite to the elephants as poaching, human population growth, loss of habitat, government corruption, civil wars, inadequate funding for wildlife protection, the easy availability of automatic weapons and the poverty of the local population took their toll. Their numbers dropped from three million in 1970 to under 400,000 in 2016. There was a brief respite for the elephants in the last decade of the twentieth century as the CITES elephant ban on the ivory trade took effect, but the lull in the butchery was short lived.

As demand for ivory surged in the emerging superpower of China, poaching skyrocketed and 50,000 elephants were killed in both 2012 and 2013 to meet the demand. Huge numbers of African building projects were financed by the Chinese whose workers wanted to bring an ivory trophy or two back home no matter what impact their souvenir hunting had on the elephant population. It looked all over for the African elephant.

And yet despite all the doom and gloom I believe that 2018 will be the ‘Year of the Elephant’. There are two reasons for my optimism and they are based on the empowerment of the local African population and a rethink on the ivory trade in China.

The future of the elephant has always depended upon the local communities who live on the fringes of Africa’s national parks. It is they who will determine whether elephants survive as a species or are poached to extinction. During the last two hundred years these natural hunters and land owners have been disenfranchised firstly by the colonial powers and then by the autocratic and sometimes corrupt authorities that followed. When they receive no economic benefit from the wildlife that raids their crops, destroys their livelihoods and damages their villages, they are inclined to side with the poachers to supplement their meagre incomes. But in recent years there has been a recognition that wildlife conservation must involve these struggling communities to save the elephant.

Private companies with a social conscience and the backing of global conservation groups have taken over the running of many of the national parks including African Parks and the Bushcamp Company. Their sustainable wildlife programmes have employed local communities as rangers, used local intelligence against poachers and returned a percentage of the tourist income to these communities. Programmes such as Conservation South Luangwa http://cslzambia.org/ have been designed to win the hearts and minds of the local community. Instead of assisting the poachers, the locals now view poaching as stealing a valuable resource that generates much of their income.

Just as Chinese demand for ivory seemed insatiable, the Chinese government stepped in with a public awareness information campaign backed by popular figures such as NBL legend Yao Ming and supported by Britain’s Princes William and Harry. The message was designed to convince the Chinese workers in Africa not to bring ivory home and to make ivory ownership as socially toxic in China as it has become in the West. The campaign worked. A recent Chinese survey showed 95% support for an ivory trade ban. At the end of December 2017, the ban was enforced, and 172 ivory carving factories were closed. Today the price of ivory has collapsed from $2,100 to $500 per kg and there is real hope that the industrial slaughter of the world’s most magnificent land animal may be over.

But there is no room for complacency. Unscrupulous traders are always seeking new markets and a resumption of the ivory trade. We must remind governments around the world that the ivory trade is a disgrace and legal hunting only provides cover for the illicit activities of the poaching gangs and ruthless traders. Heroic organisations such as Conservation South Luangwa that hold the front line against the poachers need considerable funding from the public, NGOs and governments if they are to succeed.  If we can lobby our politicians to do the right thing, there is a real chance that elephants will survive in the wild. And what a gift it will be, not just for our children but for all future generations if these magnificent animals continue to grace the African landscape forever.

  • Photo by The Bushcamp Company, South Luangwa National Park, Zambia

  |  Blog, Conspiracies, Conspiracy Theory  |   

I’ll be quick, I promise you.

Last week the Doomsday Clock edged closer to midnight by 30 seconds. The clock is now two minutes to midnight, the symbolic hour of imminent doom. The last time the clock edged this close to the end of humanity was in 1953, when the hydrogen bomb was first tested. Luckily for the planet, Flash Gordon and Superman were at the height of their superpowers and dragged the world back from the brink. Now civilization depends on you to stop its impending annihilation. Yes, you heard me correctly, it depends on YOU!

Your task is simple. Firstly, you must prevent North Korea from launching its rockets thereby triggering a nuclear holocaust. Secondly, you must nullify the incessant and provocative tweets spawned from the #realDonaldTrump account which have so damaged world stability in general. Thirdly, as the seconds tick by, you must address the dangers that technology disruption is causing democracies, including disinformation campaigns intended to manipulate elections and undermine confidence in democracy. In the final moments before Armageddon you must resolve the unstoppable growth in greenhouse gases to prevent disastrous warming of the planet.

At this stage you may be asking yourself ‘where the hell do I begin my mission to save the world?’ It is true that you do not have Superman’s cape or tights at your disposal, nor access to Flash Gordon’s rocket ship, but you do have superpowers unimaginable to those 1950’s superheroes. With access to social media and the internet, you can influence millions of likeminded superheroes around the world in nanoseconds. Your strategy therefore, is to inspire enough people with your words of wisdom such that no half-baked political despot can drive the global bus down the path marked ‘This way lies Apocalypse’.

To help you in your quest to wind back the Doomsday Clock, here are four secret nuggets of wisdom:

1) You might think that deactivating the bothersome #realDonaldTrump Twitter account might be the key to improving international relations, but you would be wrong. The account was disabled for 11 minutes in November last year without troubling the Doomsday Clock by even one second. This suggests that the miasma of irresponsible tweets oozing from that infamous account have become a source of wry amusement and lost their shock value long ago.

2) Recognise that the POTUS is half-correct. The Romans invented the phrase ‘If you want peace, prepare for war’ and they were no dummies when it came to vigorous diplomacy. Your mission is to remind those in power that the first four words in that noble phrase are just as important as the last three.

3) Whereas climate change denial among our politicians may once have been tolerated as amusing and quaint, it is now downright dangerous. The five hottest years on record all came since 2010. The international treasure – David Attenborough – has declared that the Great Barrier Reef will be dead by 2100. Greenland is losing 152 billion tons of ice a year. Hurricane frequency and intensity has increased to catastrophic levels.

We were not supposed to have major climate change during the next ten thousand years, never mind in our own lifetime. Politicians who play games at the expense of the planet on which we depend for our survival should be booted out of office during their next election. No second chances. Pass it on.

4) The dangers to our social cohesion and democracy, courtesy of Vladimir Putin’s ‘bot factories’ have been smoothed by the obstinacy and negligence of our very own social media giants. (In 2016, 150,000 accounts with links to Russia pumped out 40,000 pro-Brexit messages per day in the run-up to the referendum – then disappeared overnight*.)
The social media behemoths refused to cooperate with authorities until finally, Mark Zuckerberg promised to end the abuse of his platform, “whether through election-interference efforts, fake news, or other nefarious practices”. This only happened because of public pressure. Your part in saving the world is to keep shaming the social media giants into action and become much more ‘fake news savvy’ before spreading the latest Kremlin-generated mischief.

Armed with these four nuggets, the power of the World Wide Web and your superhero’s instincts, you can ensure that the end of the world is not yet nigh.

Good luck with your mission. The world is counting on you.

*Oleksandr Talavera, Swansea University’s, working with researchers from his university and UC Berkeley in America.


  |  Blog, Historical Context  |   

A Rhodesian Canberra bomber attacks Westlands Farm, Lusaka, Zambia in 1978. We were next door neighbours when the bombs fell.

The recent fall of the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe in November last year brought back painful memories of my own unwitting involvement in that country’s history. My parents emigrated to Zambia with my brother and I in 1968 shortly after its independence. For two small boys aged 6 and 7 it was a thrilling childhood full of adventure and excitement. The Zambian people are among the most beautiful and friendly in Africa and the country was prosperous thanks to its abundance of copper and its fertile farms.

I remember our camping trips to the game parks and the visits to the stunning Victoria Falls. I admired the majestic lions and the magnificent elephants, rhinos and giraffe. It was a place where the Zambians and Europeans mixed freely in mutual respect and friendship. At times I felt like I was living in a Garden of Eden.

A hundred miles to our south, the situation in Rhodesia as it was then called, was very different. Unlike Zambia, the white led government of Ian Smith had resisted the tide of African self-rule and had declared UDI against the British. The 300,000 whites in Rhodesia ran the government, business and most of the large farms for over sixteen years. Ian Smith had the support of the apartheid government of South Africa and against all expectations and global sanctions, Rhodesia prospered. The white Rhodesians had one of the highest standard of living in the world but over time their relationship with the African population deteriorated and the situation became untenable.

Meanwhile in Zambia, our economy worsened as the country became a one-party dictatorship and the genial and clean-living but misguided President Kenneth Kaunda flirted with socialism. When my parents bought a farm on the northern outskirts of Lusaka in the mid 1970’s, shortages of essential commodities became commonplace. To make matters worse, President Kaunda took the fateful decision to harbour an army of ‘ZAPU’ guerrillas who were fighting for Zimbabwean independence against Ian Smith’s Rhodesian regime.

Of all the places in Zambia that President Kaunda could have picked to locate the guerrilla base, he chose Westlands Farm which shared a long boundary with our own farm. We would frequently wave to the guerrillas as we drove past their training camp in our little red Fiat 127 on the way to town. The well-armed guerrillas became our polite but volatile new neighbours.

The political leader of the ZAPU guerrillas was a man called Joshua Nkomo and in September 1978 he looked like a man on the brink of history. He had the ear of both the British government and Zambia’s president Kaunda. Nkomo held secret peace negotiations with Ian Smith of Rhodesia who had realised a peaceful settlement was preferable to a long and bloody civil war. But then the inexplicable happened.

On the 3rd September 1978, a civil airliner, Air Rhodesia flight 825 carrying 52 passengers and 4 crew was shot down by ZAPU guerrillas. 38 innocent people died in the crash and of the survivors, 10 were rounded up by the guerrillas and executed. Only 8 lived to tell the tale. It was a horrific act of brutality which ended the aspirations of Nkomo to become the first president of an independent Zimbabwe. From that moment, his international supporters regarded him as toxic and their support moved to his more extreme rival Robert Mugabe who was to rule Zimbabwe with an iron fist for the next 40 years. The event also led to brutal retaliations against Zambia from the Rhodesian armed forces.

On 19th October 1978, in what became known as the ‘Green Leader’ raid, the Rhodesians launched one of the most audacious air attacks in history against Westlands Farm (renamed as Freedom Camp).  A squadron of Hawker Hunters, Canberra bombers and Alouette attack helicopters flew 100 miles across Zambian airspace and bombed Freedom Camp just as the guerrillas were parading on the central square. Luckily my brother and I were still at boarding school in the UK, but my father described how he dived into a nearby ditch to take cover and how the glass in our farm shattered from the exploding bombs. The attack resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives and the destruction of Freedom Camp.

In one of the most famous aircraft broadcasts in history, the leader of the bombing mission known as Green Leader, calmly instructed the Lusaka air traffic controller to pass a message on to the Zambian air force not to interfere with the raid. Just as calmly and politely, the air traffic controller acknowledged the instruction. A harrowing YouTube video of the bombing exists and in that video, just as the bombs are being released, our family farm looms into view. It is almost as if our farm is the target of the raid. The discovery of the video clip had a profound impact on myself and my brother.

In July 1979, my brother and I returned to our farm in Zambia for our long summer holiday. There had been a second raid on Freedom Camp in March that year and tensions were high. My brother and I still waved to the survivors in our red Fiat, but many of the guerrillas were deeply suspicious of the young white schoolboys who they believed may have had a hand in passing intelligence to the Rhodesians. Many guerrillas had abandoned Freedom Camp and were ‘living off the land’ with their AK47 machine guns. Inevitably our farm was attacked by an armed gang and tragically one of our farm workers was killed. As luck would have it, my brother and I had chosen to spend the night in Lusaka and missed the raid by a few hours. We will never know if we were the intended targets.

The Rhodesian war ended a few months later and our ZAPU neighbours returned to an independent Zimbabwe. Many of the white Rhodesians blamed the politicians for betraying their beleaguered white run country. No-one can deny their bravery or fighting skills, but how much better would it have been if Ian Smith had followed the Zambian model in 1964? There would have been no civil war and it is unlikely that the despotic president Robert Mugabe would have wrecked the economy of the once prosperous nation and caused such widespread social unrest. But with the recent fall of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe is at the threshold of a new dawn. I wish the country, its new president Emmerson Mnangagwa and its long-suffering people of all races the very best for the future. May it be prosperous and peaceful one.


  |  Events, Interviews & Awards  |   

Sydney writer Christopher Hepworth’s Hollywood-paced international thrillers feature a 21stcentury “James Bond” hero, a high body count and lots of action in exotic settings. It’s Indiana Jones with high stakes conspiracy.

Hi there: I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today Christopher tells us why he loves the thriller genre and how growing up in Zambia has influenced his writing.

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

  • What Christopher loves about writing thrillers 
  • The magic Sydney location where he works
  • Why Sam Jardine is a particularly “21st century” hero
  • The mentors who’ve inspired him
  • How he survived a guerilla attack in childhood Zambia
  • And why he’d rather go down the Nile than camping in England

Listen to the podcast here:

Read full article Here


  |  Reviews  |   

 

Looking for some holiday reading? We review Christopher Hepworth’s “The Last Oracle”, a fast-paced thriller starring Sam Jardine, the world’s greatest negotiator – and a procurement professional!

As a series of bizarre climate-related events occur across our planet, it seems the world is edging towards a catastrophic tipping point.

Rex Daingerfield is the owner of a giant fracking company that seeks to exploit a rich seam of gas in the environmentally sensitive Greenland ice shelf. But Daingerfield has a nemesis – his daughter. Born to an Egyptian mother, she is inducted as the Oracle of the Temple of Sekhmet. Her role is to protect the earth from the likes of her father.

The Oracle recruits the world’s greatest negotiator, Sam Jardine, to convince her father to change his destructive business model. But a secret society of the rich and powerful stands to profit from the chaos that has gripped the world. Led by an errant priest from the Temple of Sekhmet, they will do anything to stop Jardine

Full Review Available at this Link:

MEET THE JAMES BOND OF PROCUREMENT – PROCUREMENT NEWS

 


  |  Blog, Conspiracy Theory  |   

I recently attended a presentation by a ‘futurist’ who advises large corporations how they should prepare for technological and societal changes over the next five years. While highly entertaining, there was nothing in his list that couldn’t be predicted by the average Joe. So last night I gazed into my author’s crystal ball to determine your future, dear reader and was shocked by what I saw.

Politics will descend into an Orwellian nightmare.

Continuing the trend of obnoxious politicians from Donald Rumsfeld (“there are known knowns and known unknowns”) to the truth distorting Nigel Farage and the thin-skinned bullying of Donald Trump, politics will become a race to the bottom of the gutter. Western style democracy as we once knew it, will be on life support. Neo-Nazi’s will become your next door neighbours, Antifas will use your granny flat as a squat and your local pub will become the chapter house of a white supremacist gang.

2018       Your pre-school toddler will suffer burn-out.

A new breed of early learning tutors will emerge to bring out the young Einstein in your three-year-old child. He will persuade you that if your little angel cannot memorise ‘pi’ to one hundred decimal places and recite the opening soliloquy of Shakespeare’s ‘Much ado about Nothing’ then she will ‘miss out’ forever and be thrown on the scrap heap of life. Toddlers around the world will become fat, obnoxious and hyperallergic as their Tiger mums drag them off the playground and into the classroom to study yet more quantum physics and ancient Greek.

2019       Your country will avoid the worst consequences of global warming.

But only by the skin of its teeth and no thanks to your local politician who trusts his gut more than the country’s most eminent and concerned scientists. Pure economics will save the day. The cost of renewable energy will fall to the point that your fellow taxpayers will refuse point blank to pick up the $10bn bill for your MP’s pet ‘clean coal’ project.

Electric vehicles will struggle to gain traction until some bright spark will work out how to make money by the bucket load from electric vehicle recharging stations.

Cash will go the way of the dodo and high street banks will close, replaced by crypto-currencies available as an app on your iPhone. As traditional banking jobs disappear, the only new jobs will be with Amazon, the local beauty salon or as a barista at the local café. You will lose half of your life savings in The Great Bitcoin Bubble of 2019.

2020       You will misplace your smartphone and life as you knew it will cease to exist.

It will take you three months to replace your phone and much longer to retrieve your precious data after you discover half a dozen Serbian students have stolen your identity and the rest of your life savings.

Later that year, Donald Trump will be elected for a second term in a landslide thanks to massive campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association and the American Petroleum Institute. His Democratic presidential rival ‘Crooked ole’ Bernie’ never stood a chance.

2021       The march of technology will blow your mind.

The internet will be provided by satellite; robots will have personalities; trucks will become driverless, but cars will not (but they will become a lot smarter). Your groceries will be delivered by drone. Amazon will ‘know’ what you need from the supermarket better than you do yourself based on ‘big data’ and ‘artificial intelligence’. Amazon will get your order right 99.9% of the time.

You will lose your ‘important’ job at the insurance company to a clever algorithm that was programmed by a teenager in Manila. You will refuse a job painting toe nails at the local beauty salon and so the government will stop your dole money.

2021       You will be on first name terms with the Russian mafia

Social media ‘bots’ will become so sophisticated, it will be impossible to tell whether that hot chick you will meet online is a real person, a Nigerian scammer or the creation of a Russian mafia gang. Unluckily for you, the lovely ‘Christina’ from Idaho who seduced you into parting with half of your redundancy money is actually the oligarch Sergei Volkov, head of the Novgorod mafia.

Just like Ebenezer Scrooge who was shown his future by the ‘ghost of Christmas yet to come’, you will be happy to know there is still time to change. You do not have to accept the dark, brooding social vision of the future that I have seen in my author’s crystal ball. Rise up! Be positive and fight for social justice when you see a chance to make the world a better place before it’s too late. And good luck with your future!


  |  Blog, Environment  |   
My latest novel, The Last Oracle will be launched on Tuesday 17th October. The book’s hero, Sam Jardine is the ‘James Bond’ of the Procurement profession. He is as ordinary a person as any one of us, but he has the bad luck to be the employed by various nefarious organisations who are putting the future of the world at risk to further their own selfish agendas. Luckily, his negotiation skills are extraordinary and with his moral compass honed by years of ‘procurement compliance training’ he is the right man to save the day!

In The Last Oracle, Sam joins a US based fracking company that is drilling for oil on the environmentally sensitive Greenland ice shelf. Sam soon clashes with the CEO and is re-deployed to Daingerfield Oil’s renewable energy division where it is assumed that his career will stultify for the foreseeable future. But as the world edges towards a disastrous environmental tipping point, a group of politicians and vested interests seek to profit from the climate chaos that will follow. Sam Jardine must embark on a life or death negotiation with the rich and powerful, the outcome of which the future of the planet will depend.

We cannot all be heroes like Sam Jardine, but we can all make a massive difference to the world around us. Procurement is becoming central to the ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) trend that is sweeping the corporate world.

With the rise of the giant Ethical Investment funds, no ASX 200, S&P 500 or FTSE 100 companies can ignore the demand to be good corporate citizens. Those that do, risk their share price falling as the ethical investors place their business elsewhere.

The most obvious example where procurement has been central to ESG movement is the Modern Slavery Act in the UK and which is soon to be introduced to the Australian Parliament. I was at a CIPSA Conference in 2015 when Twiggy Forrest, the CEO of Fortescue Metals, first raised the concept and received a ringing procurement endorsement of his crusade to end slavery in our supply chains.

Then there is the growth of Social Enterprises. These are companies that exist to employ physically and socially disadvantaged members of our community and whose goods and services contribute to the growth of our economy. None of these fine organisations expect hand-outs and they compete with the very best. If the Procurement teams of large organisations were to direct even 1% of their expenditure towards these social enterprises, imagine what a difference it would make to society!

Then there is Procurement’s fight against corrupt practices, anti-money laundering and sanctioned countries and organisations. If Procurement were to exercise a zero-tolerance approach to these insidious activities, it would go a long way towards destroying them altogether.

And finally, there is my personal passion which is encouraging the use of environmentally sustainable products throughout the supply chain.  Procurement should be leading the way in buying solar panels or sourcing energy from renewable sources. We should insist on recycled products and developing alternatives to damaging chemical products. We should be encouraging the use of Skype meetings and video conferences and discouraging wasteful travel.

You don’t have to be Sam Jardine to make a world of difference. By doing your job in the most responsible and ethical way possible, you can make procurement a profession fit for heroes!

To order your copy of The Last Oracle, clink on the link below:

US, UK, AUS, CA


  |  Blog, Environment  |   

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the global oil industry. We depend upon it for almost every aspect of our lives and until recently our biggest fear was that oil would run out. How would we drive our cars and fly to our favourite destinations without this precious commodity? Whole economies including those in the Persian Gulf, Russia and to a lesser extent the USA still depend upon oil for their wealth and wars have been fought to ensure access to cheap and reliable sources.

The US oil and gas industry is worth over two hundred billion dollars a year and employs ten million people in the US or about one in nineteen of its working population. The wealth that the industry produces is enormous and is firmly emblazoned on the American psyche and culture. I remember watching shows like the Beverly Hillbillies and Dallas with fondness and the instant riches that ‘black gold’ bestowed on those lucky fictional families.

The oil industry carries a huge responsibility and on the whole, it does so very well. Most multinational companies have ‘green’ programmes and are obsessive about health and safety. Its employees are highly skilled, trained and well paid. Most multinational oil companies are respected and rightly so. When you consider the massive logistical effort in extracting oil from some of the most inhospitable places on earth it is cheap and convenient. It has always amazed me that a litre of petrol is often cheaper than bottled water.

Unfortunately, oil extraction has come at a significant cost to the environment and human life. The large number of ‘spills’ including Deepwater Horizon and the Exxon Valdez has been well documented. And there is considerable debate on the long-term effects of ‘fracking’ which is well covered in my book ’The Last Oracle’ due out in October.

All three of my three books have taken an apocalyptic view of particular industries that we rely upon and trust. I explore the implications for the world should those industries (e.g. the pharmaceutical and social media companies) abuse the power that society has bestowed on them. My study of the oil industry has been especially fascinating because of the enormous wealth it generates. How far would the industry go to protect its wealth and position at the top of the food chain? I have focussed on a fictional but entirely plausible conspiracy by the oil industry to eliminate its main competitor – the electric and solar powered vehicle industry. I have imagined a situation where the fossil fuel industry has used its vast resources and influence to corrupt our politicians and engineer the destruction of emerging renewable technologies to protect their interests. The impact of this action brings about catastrophic climate change as the rise of greenhouse gases from vehicle and power generation chokes the planet.

But is such a scenario realistic?  I honestly believe that it is and is happening right now. An astonishing thirty cents of every dollar donated to Republican presidential candidates in 2016 came from people who owed their fortune to fossil fuels. The total amount donated by those individuals to the candidate’s election Super Pacs was over $107m.  Unfortunately, because of the massive expense of running for office, American presidential candidates cannot win elections unless they have considerable independent wealth (like Donald Trump) or their fund raising teams accept donations from industry special interest groups. That is why so many presidential candidates push the agendas of the gun lobby or climate science denial so hard. Ted Cruz, for example, banked 57% of his campaign funds from fossil fuel interests* and claimed climate change is a fiction perpetuated by liberals who want control over the economy. It is now almost a prerequisite for Republican presidential candidates to ignore scientific evidence and deny climate change.

My new book explores the possibility that politicians would go one step further and kill off an entire developing industry that competes with fossil fuels even though it would mean the eventual destruction of the planet. I leave you to judge whether this scenario is pure fiction or is happening for real even as we speak.

*Source US Federal Election Commission