Summary

Author Lewis opens this chapter with a description of how staffers at the U.S. Department of Energy waited for days to meet with representatives of the incoming Trump administration, when transition meetings usually took place the day after a presidential inauguration. He also references how staffers had spent a year preparing documents and other materials for the transition, and how none of them were accessed by the man who eventually did come in to oversee the transition. This was Thomas Pyle, the head of an organization funded by oil company Exxon and the right-wing Koch Industries.

Pyle’s interest, according to sources cited by the author, was more in finding out who had participated in international conversations about climate change than on the operations of the Department of Energy. Those operations, the author adds, include everything from monitoring the movement and development of...