The Reckoning is a story about how Big Oil became the richest and most powerful industry the world has ever seen by selling a product that they have known for decades would warm the Earth's climate and cause wide-spread loss, suffering, and chaos.
This was not simply an unforeseen byproduct of technological progress, or a loophole in our political system, but the consequence of deliberately fraudulent acts and willful flouting of the law that has been orchestrated by a small group of fossil fuel industry leaders over the last 100 years, culminating in the 2,500 law suits that are now in train against them.
The Reckoning is about the pursuit of justice in a rapidly warming world. It chronicles the lives of scientists, lawyers, activists, and politicians who are determined to achieve some measure of accountability and argues that only by seeing climate change as a crime story can you understand how we got into this mess, and what, at this late hour, might be done about it.