By 1980 (when van Beurden was twenty-two), the science was effectively confirmed, and there was no excuse not to act. And “act” they did: for the next forty years, the API, and its affiliates, actively engaged in what the futurist Alex Steffen calls “predatory delay.” Predatory delay, as Steffen defines it, is “the deliberate slowing of change to prolong a profitable but unsustainable status quo whose costs will be paid by others.”