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Actions to prevent disruption of Earth’s climate have proven tragically slow and insufficient. Notwithstanding some progress, gaps between aspiration and realisation seem larger than ever. This is despite climate concerns being among the most high-profile and active fields of environmentalism over the past few decades. The contrast is stark with other areas of continuing ecological struggle, which have in different areas yielded greater (though still incomplete) degrees of past success, often against comparably major interests. The puzzle is further compounded in that persistent relative failure on climate issues has unfolded at the same time as seemingly unprecedented levels of environmentalist ‘policy impact’–at least if judged by the clamour in elite circles around ‘evidence-based decisions’ driven by ‘sound science’. Why is this? How can progress be so slow on climate action, when the acknowledged basis in values, evidence and the shared long-run self-interest of worldwide societies are all so compelling? By what practical means might this impasse be remedied? It is here that the diverse interdisciplinary field of STS may offer some crucial but under-appreciated contributions. For it is in STS that academic attention arguably turns most distinctively to the ways politics unfold inside (as well as around) science–and knowledge in general. And it is here that some particularly distinctive insights also begin to emerge. Unlike many other kinds of policy-relevant study scrutinising how interests and privilege bear on how truth speaks to power, STS has also pioneered attention to ways and degrees in which (even in supposedly pure science) power …