The reality is that both job-hungry politicians and greedy Wall Street investors have been engaged in years of magical thinking, convincing themselves there was an ever-rising demand for fossil fuels even as the ticking of the climate-change bomb grew louder. The journalist Bethany McLean — famous for her role in exposing Enron’s financial con job 20 years — has found some of the same dubious accounting practices in the steady growth of U.S. oil-and-gas production, leading to a wave of bankruptcies (even before the recent price plunge) and more misery looming, with a staggering $100 billion in debt accumulated by wildly optimistic drillers coming due the next four years. “In reality, the dream was always an illusion, and its collapse was already underway,” she wrote in the New York Times as the coronavirus hammer fell.