by Osha Gray Davidson
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people
can change the world.”
—Margaret Mead
Because Americans
are optimists we tend to see Mead’s observation as upbeat and life-affirming
(as it was probably intended). Blinkered by optimism, however, we miss the dark
flip side of her observation—that a few fanatics can do immense harm.
In their sweeping and comprehensive new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco
Smoke to Global Warming, historians Naomi Oreskes
and Erick M. Conway document how a handful of right-wing ideologues—all
scientists—have (mis)shaped U.S. policy for decades, delaying government
action on life-and-death issues from cigarettes and second-hand smoke, to acid
rain, and now, finally, to climate change. The book is similar to the popular
Discovery Channel show “How Do They Do It?” Only instead of investigating
quirky mysteries like how stripes get into toothpaste, Merchants of Doubt looks at exactly how we arrived at the gravest
crisis in the history of our species—one we created ourselves.
Although most of
these scientists were influential men in themselves (and they are all men),
they could not have done as much damage without powerful allies. Whole
industries bankrolled their research, sometimes laundering the money through
front groups with innocuous names. Think tanks like the George C. Marshall
Institute were financed specifically to publish and disseminate their papers—junk science that couldn’t survive the rigors of peer-reviewed journals.
Oreskes and Conway also devote an insightful section to the mass media’s mostly
unwitting complicity in this scandal.
This premise may
sound like a conspiracy theory, but the truth Oreskes and Conway elucidate is
more banal and convincing. The title, Merchants
of Doubt, frames the authors’ argument, echoing an internal memo from the
Brown & Williamson tobacco company that declared: “Doubt is our product
since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in
the mind of the general public.” Big tobacco helped finance the industry of
doubt in its modern form, run by the scientists whose schemes this book
details. In a sense, this is an industrial history and it should be no more
shocking to see the same names continually popping up than it is to see Lee
Iacocca’s in a history of the auto industry.
Fred SeitzThe central
characters in Merchants of Doubt include Fred Seitz, S. Fred Singer,
William Nierenberg, and Robert Jastrow. These may not exactly be household
names, but it’s probably not much of a stretch to call them the founding
fathers of industrial-strength doubt.
Fred Seitz was a
pioneer of solid-state physics who helped develop the atom bomb. From the end
of World War II until his death in 2008, Seitz devoted himself to protecting
laissez-faire capitalism from communism. He moved quickly from scientific
research to administrative work, serving as president of the National Academy
of Sciences from 1962 to 1969. When the Soviet Union
broke a moratorium on atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, Seitz immediately
urged President John Kennedy to respond in kind, despite evidence that
radioactive fallout contaminated swaths of land for more than a thousand miles.
Innocent people would die, but some collateral damage is inevitable when
fighting a war, even a cold one.
Fred SingerFred Singer is
another physicist turned cold warrior. He began his career developing the
government’s earth observation satellite system. Along the way, Singer took up
the cudgel defending free enterprise by opposing environmental regulations. The
other “merchants of doubt” profiled by Oreskes and Conway traveled a similar path. Physicist
William Nierenberg’s work on the Manhattan Project led him in the early 1960s
to become NATO’s chief scientist working on developing weapons to use against
the Soviets. Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow moved from NASA into a leading
position supporting Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, aka,
Star Wars) to counter “Soviet hegemony,” which he called the
“greatest peril” in U.S.
history.
What all these men
have in common (aside from their background in physics) is the belief that the
Cold War didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In their minds, and in the minds of their followers, “real Americans” are still battling socialism, only now the
threat comes primarily from within. Grasping that bizarre and paranoid notion
is central to understanding their motivations and methods.
In the 1950s, Big
Tobacco had begun using scientists to sow doubt about links between their
product and cancer. As the evidence against them mounted in the 1970s, the
tobacco industry realized they needed something more. They found it in Seitz,
who was not merely a scientist, but the former president of the Academy of Sciences.
R. J. Reynolds put
Seitz in charge of the company’s biomedical research grant program. The amount
of money available was staggering. In 1981, Oreskes and Conway write, the
American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association together contributed
$300,000 to research. In that same year, Big Tobacco directed $6.3 million to
researchers who consistently found no evidence conclusively linking tobacco to
serious medical problems.
Seitz and the
tobacco industry were a perfect fit. Environmental and industrial regulations
were anathema to each. For the industry, it was a simple matter of
self-interest. While Seitz was well-paid for his work, ideology may have been
the more important factor. Over the years Seitz’s conservative views had grown
ever more extreme. He found himself alienated from many of his scientific
colleagues over the Vietnam War (many of them were against the war; Seitz was
an enthusiastic supporter). He also became convinced that environmentalists
were dupes of communist propaganda, if not outright traitors.
Eventually,
Seitz’s right-wing views would become too much for even the tobacco industry.
Seitz was, in their view, “not sufficiently rational” to maintain a public
connection with the industry.
William NierenbergWhile Seitz was
busy doling out “research” funds for R. J. Reynolds, his colleague, William
Nierenberg, was leading the fight in a different arena: to prevent the federal
government from taking action on acid rain. Once again, Oreskes and Conway do
an excellent job of bringing to life a complex and important environmental
battle that is poorly remembered today. In 1982, Nierenberg was appointed by
President Ronald Reagan to lead a review of the scientific evidence concerning
acid rain. Had the acidity of rain in the northeastern part of the United States
really increased? If so, how serious was
the problem? And what caused acid rain? Was it naturally occurring, or did
humans play a role in creating the problem?
The questions were
valid, or at least they had been when the phenomenon was first examined a
decade earlier. A broad scientific consensus had emerged over several years, so
that by 1979 it wasn’t news to most scientists in the field when Scientific American published an article
explaining to the public that “In recent decades, the acidity of rain and snow
has increased sharply over wide areas. The principle cause is the release of
sulfur and nitrogen by the burning of fossil fuels” to generate
electricity. What’s more, the National
Academy of Sciences had released a report in 1981 with similar conclusions, but
going even further. That study concluded that there was “clear evidence of
serious hazard to human health and the biosphere” from acid rain, requiring
immediate action.
The Nierenberg
Panel produced a report at war with itself, marked by a key internal
contradiction. For the most part, the executive summary agreed with the 1981
NAS study. But, write Oreskes and Conway, an appendix was added suggesting that
“we really didn’t know enough to move
forward with emissions controls.” The confusion bred by the report cast just
enough doubt on what was actually known about acid rain to allow the Reagan
administration to do exactly what it had wanted to do all along: nothing. The
misleading appendix was written by Fred Singer. In the early 1980s, Singer was
a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, arguably the most influential
conservative think tank during the Reagan era. Created with an initial
quarter-million dollar grant from beer magnate and right-wing Republican
activist Joseph Coors, the group was initially led by Paul Weyrich, who
combined absolute allegiance to the Free Market, ultra-nationalism, and
fundamentalist evangelical Christianity of the narrowest kind. (Along with
Jerry Falwell, Weyrich founded the group Moral Majority.)
Robert JastrowNineteen
eighty-four marked a key moment in Oreske and Conway’s darkly fascinating
history of selling doubt. The issue at the center of events at the time had no
obvious relation to climate change. The controversy involved missiles, specifically,
Ronald Reagan’s $60 billion program to build an impenetrable “missile shield”
over the United States.
Most scientists regarded SDI as technologically impossible and almost certainly
destabilizing. Over a thousand experts signed a petition stating that they
would refuse any government funding of projects that could further SDI. The
move enraged Seitz and his colleagues Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow. In
reaction, the three hawks formed the George C. Marshall Institute, a
conservative think tank dedicated to selling Star Wars to policy makers and the
public. For Seitz and his colleagues, GMI represented a decisive step away from
the scientific community—and from science itself. With the fate of the
country hanging in the balance, an ideology devoted to the red, white, and blue
came before science, which prided itself on being colorless and colorblind.
As the unworkable
SDI inevitably faded, GMI turned to other ideological battles, including ozone
depletion and global warming. Their adversaries saw these as scientific issues,
not clashes of ideology, which gave GMI an advantage. Science recognizes the
inevitability of uncertainty. The point isn’t to go for perfection but to
continually refine models of how complex phenomena work. Science uses doubt as
a tool, a prod to deepen understanding. Seitz and his associates used doubt as
a weapon against science. They seized on inevitable uncertainties in scientific
models as evidence that the models had no value, or worse. In 1987, for
example, Singer, then working at the Department of Transportation, wrote an
article published in The Wall Street Journal that was rife with
inaccuracies and distortions minimizing the importance of the discovery of a
hole in the ozone layer, a portion of the lower stratosphere that blocks most
harmful ultraviolet rays from reaching the surface of the earth.
“It was the
beginning of a counternarrative,” write Oreskes and Conway, “that scientists
had overreacted before, were overreacting now, and therefore couldn’t be
trusted.”
That same
counternarrative of denial continues today, stronger and more strident than
ever, and now focused on creating doubt about all aspects of climate change.
The ultimate goal hasn’t changed since the tobacco days—preventing
government regulation of industry. In a 2007 article, Newsweek called the George C. Marshall
Institute “a central cog in the denial machine.” GMI has received millions of
dollars from conservative foundations and corporations. Exactly how much isn’t
known because in 2001, tired of facing criticism over the fact that one of the
largest corporate donors to its anti-global warming work was oil giant
ExxonMobil, GMI made its donor list secret.
The denial machine
contains a huge number of cogs, and it would take an encyclopedia to list them
all. The authors do an excellent job, however, of touching on many of the cogs
inside that dreadful box, from clueless writers (Bjorn
Lomborg, John
Tierney, George
Will) to odious politicians (Sen. James Inhofe, Vice President Dick Cheney)
to the scores of conservative foundations that wrap themselves in the flag that
they disgrace by their actions.
Merchants of Doubt is an important book.
How important? If you read just one book on climate change this year, read Merchants of Doubt. And if you have time
to read two, reread Merchants of Doubt.
Related Links:
Ask Umbra’s Book Club: Are you a possum?
Paul Krugman on ‘Building a Green Economy’
Ask Umbra’s Book Club: The three L’s—laziness, learning, and lawlessness
(This is a guest post from the author’s blog.)
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