“The remarks of these lobbyists suggested that many of them live on a different planet, where climate change is not an urgent challenge but rather is the obsession of ideological malcontents,” reports ex-Clinton speechwriter David Halperin, who attended the event hosted by the United States Energy Association. The association’s members “are not the CEOs of America’s oil, coal, and gas companies,” he adds. “Rather, they are the heads of the Washington-based trade associations that lobby against regulation of greenhouse gases and toxic pollution.”

Halperin gives a detailed account of the session, including the moment when participants learned the U.S. Supreme Court had just decided against a stay in Obama’s signature Clean Power Plan. “The industry had hired scores of lawyers to argue for that stay,” Halpern recalls. “The room got a little sadder,” and the ballroom crowd “started to thin out as the bad legal news sunk in.”