\nSmoke to Global Warming<\/a>, historians Naomi Oreskes
\nand Erick M. Conway document how a handful of right-wing ideologues—all
\nscientists—have (mis)shaped U.S. policy for decades, delaying government
\naction on life-and-death issues from cigarettes and second-hand smoke, to acid
\nrain, and now, finally, to climate change. The book is similar to the popular
\nDiscovery Channel show “How Do They Do It?” Only instead of investigating
\nquirky mysteries like how stripes get into toothpaste, Merchants of Doubt looks at exactly how we arrived at the gravest
\ncrisis in the history of our species—one we created ourselves.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Although most of
\nthese scientists were influential men in themselves (and they are all men),
\nthey could not have done as much damage without powerful allies. Whole
\nindustries bankrolled their research, sometimes laundering the money through
\nfront groups with innocuous names. Think tanks like the George C. Marshall
\nInstitute were financed specifically to publish and disseminate their papers—junk science that couldn’t survive the rigors of peer-reviewed journals.
\nOreskes and Conway also devote an insightful section to the mass media’s mostly
\nunwitting complicity in this scandal.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This premise may
\nsound like a conspiracy theory, but the truth Oreskes and Conway elucidate is
\nmore banal and convincing. The title, Merchants
\nof Doubt, frames the authors’ argument, echoing an internal memo from the
\nBrown & Williamson tobacco company that declared: “Doubt is our product
\nsince it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in
\nthe mind of the general public.” Big tobacco helped finance the industry of
\ndoubt in its modern form, run by the scientists whose schemes this book
\ndetails. In a sense, this is an industrial history and it should be no more
\nshocking to see the same names continually popping up than it is to see Lee
\nIacocca’s in a history of the auto industry.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Fred SeitzThe central <\/p>\n Fred Seitz was a <\/p>\n Fred SingerFred Singer is <\/p>\n What all these men <\/p>\n In the 1950s, Big <\/p>\n R. J. Reynolds put <\/p>\n Seitz and the <\/p>\n Eventually, William NierenbergWhile Seitz was <\/p>\n The questions were <\/p>\n The Nierenberg <\/p>\n Robert JastrowNineteen <\/p>\n As the unworkable <\/p>\n “It was the <\/p>\n That same <\/p>\n The denial machine <\/p>\n Merchants of Doubt is an important book. Related Links:<\/strong><\/p>\n Ask Umbra’s Book Club: Are you a possum?<\/a><\/p>\n Paul Krugman on ‘Building a Green Economy’<\/a><\/p>\n Ask Umbra’s Book Club: The three L’s—laziness, learning, and lawlessness<\/a><\/p>\n
\ncharacters in Merchants of Doubt include Fred Seitz, S. Fred Singer<\/a>,
\nWilliam Nierenberg, and Robert Jastrow. These may not exactly be household
\nnames, but it’s probably not much of a stretch to call them the founding
\nfathers of industrial-strength doubt.<\/p>\n
\npioneer of solid-state physics who helped develop the atom bomb. From the end
\nof World War II until his death in 2008, Seitz devoted himself to protecting
\nlaissez-faire capitalism from communism. He moved quickly from scientific
\nresearch to administrative work, serving as president of the National Academy
\nof Sciences from 1962 to 1969. When the Soviet Union
\nbroke a moratorium on atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, Seitz immediately
\nurged President John Kennedy to respond in kind, despite evidence that
\nradioactive fallout contaminated swaths of land for more than a thousand miles.
\nInnocent people would die, but some collateral damage is inevitable when
\nfighting a war, even a cold one.<\/p>\n
\nanother physicist turned cold warrior. He began his career developing the
\ngovernment’s earth observation satellite system. Along the way, Singer took up
\nthe cudgel defending free enterprise by opposing environmental regulations. The
\nother “merchants of doubt” profiled by Oreskes and Conway traveled a similar path. Physicist
\nWilliam Nierenberg’s work on the Manhattan Project led him in the early 1960s
\nto become NATO’s chief scientist working on developing weapons to use against
\nthe Soviets. Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow moved from NASA into a leading
\nposition supporting Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, aka,
\nStar Wars) to counter “Soviet hegemony,” which he called the
\n“greatest peril” in U.S.
\nhistory.<\/p>\n
\nhave in common (aside from their background in physics) is the belief that the
\nCold War didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
\nIn their minds, and in the minds of their followers, “real Americans” are still battling socialism, only now the
\nthreat comes primarily from within. Grasping that bizarre and paranoid notion
\nis central to understanding their motivations and methods.<\/p>\n
\nTobacco had begun using scientists to sow doubt about links between their
\nproduct and cancer. As the evidence against them mounted in the 1970s, the
\ntobacco industry realized they needed something more. They found it in Seitz,
\nwho was not merely a scientist, but the former president of the Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n
\nSeitz in charge of the company’s biomedical research grant program. The amount
\nof money available was staggering. In 1981, Oreskes and Conway write, the
\nAmerican Cancer Society and the American Lung Association together contributed
\n$300,000 to research. In that same year, Big Tobacco directed $6.3 million to
\nresearchers who consistently found no evidence conclusively linking tobacco to
\nserious medical problems.<\/p>\n
\ntobacco industry were a perfect fit. Environmental and industrial regulations
\nwere anathema to each. For the industry, it was a simple matter of
\nself-interest. While Seitz was well-paid for his work, ideology may have been
\nthe more important factor. Over the years Seitz’s conservative views had grown
\never more extreme. He found himself alienated from many of his scientific
\ncolleagues over the Vietnam War (many of them were against the war; Seitz was
\nan enthusiastic supporter). He also became convinced that environmentalists
\nwere dupes of communist propaganda, if not outright traitors.<\/p>\n
\nSeitz’s right-wing views would become too much for even the tobacco industry.
\nSeitz was, in their view, “not sufficiently rational” to maintain a public
\nconnection with the industry.<\/p>\n
\nbusy doling out “research” funds for R. J. Reynolds, his colleague, William
\nNierenberg, was leading the fight in a different arena: to prevent the federal
\ngovernment from taking action on acid rain. Once again, Oreskes and Conway do
\nan excellent job of bringing to life a complex and important environmental
\nbattle that is poorly remembered today. In 1982, Nierenberg was appointed by
\nPresident Ronald Reagan to lead a review of the scientific evidence concerning
\nacid rain. Had the acidity of rain in the northeastern part of the United States
\nreally increased? If so, how serious was
\nthe problem? And what caused acid rain? Was it naturally occurring, or did
\nhumans play a role in creating the problem?<\/p>\n
\nvalid, or at least they had been when the phenomenon was first examined a
\ndecade earlier. A broad scientific consensus had emerged over several years, so
\nthat by 1979 it wasn’t news to most scientists in the field when Scientific American published an article
\nexplaining to the public that “In recent decades, the acidity of rain and snow
\nhas increased sharply over wide areas. The principle cause is the release of
\nsulfur and nitrogen by the burning of fossil fuels” to generate
\nelectricity. What’s more, the National
\nAcademy of Sciences had released a report in 1981 with similar conclusions, but
\ngoing even further. That study concluded that there was “clear evidence of
\nserious hazard to human health and the biosphere” from acid rain, requiring
\nimmediate action.<\/p>\n
\nPanel produced a report at war with itself, marked by a key internal
\ncontradiction. For the most part, the executive summary agreed with the 1981
\nNAS study. But, write Oreskes and Conway, an appendix was added suggesting that
\n“we really didn’t know enough to move
\nforward with emissions controls.” The confusion bred by the report cast just
\nenough doubt on what was actually known about acid rain to allow the Reagan
\nadministration to do exactly what it had wanted to do all along: nothing. The
\nmisleading appendix was written by Fred Singer. In the early 1980s, Singer was
\na senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, arguably the most influential
\nconservative think tank during the Reagan era. Created with an initial
\nquarter-million dollar grant from beer magnate and right-wing Republican
\nactivist Joseph Coors, the group was initially led by Paul Weyrich, who
\ncombined absolute allegiance to the Free Market, ultra-nationalism, and
\nfundamentalist evangelical Christianity of the narrowest kind. (Along with
\nJerry Falwell, Weyrich founded the group Moral Majority.)<\/p>\n
\neighty-four marked a key moment in Oreske and Conway’s darkly fascinating
\nhistory of selling doubt. The issue at the center of events at the time had no
\nobvious relation to climate change. The controversy involved missiles, specifically,
\nRonald Reagan’s $60 billion program to build an impenetrable “missile shield”
\nover the United States.
\nMost scientists regarded SDI as technologically impossible and almost certainly
\ndestabilizing. Over a thousand experts signed a petition stating that they
\nwould refuse any government funding of projects that could further SDI. The
\nmove enraged Seitz and his colleagues Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow. In
\nreaction, the three hawks formed the George C. Marshall Institute, a
\nconservative think tank dedicated to selling Star Wars to policy makers and the
\npublic. For Seitz and his colleagues, GMI represented a decisive step away from
\nthe scientific community—and from science itself. With the fate of the
\ncountry hanging in the balance, an ideology devoted to the red, white, and blue
\ncame before science, which prided itself on being colorless and colorblind.<\/p>\n
\nSDI inevitably faded, GMI turned to other ideological battles, including ozone
\ndepletion and global warming. Their adversaries saw these as scientific issues,
\nnot clashes of ideology, which gave GMI an advantage. Science recognizes the
\ninevitability of uncertainty. The point isn’t to go for perfection but to
\ncontinually refine models of how complex phenomena work. Science uses doubt as
\na tool, a prod to deepen understanding. Seitz and his associates used doubt as
\na weapon against science. They seized on inevitable uncertainties in scientific
\nmodels as evidence that the models had no value, or worse. In 1987, for
\nexample, Singer, then working at the Department of Transportation, wrote an
\narticle published in The Wall Street Journal that was rife with
\ninaccuracies and distortions minimizing the importance of the discovery of a
\nhole in the ozone layer, a portion of the lower stratosphere that blocks most
\nharmful ultraviolet rays from reaching the surface of the earth.<\/p>\n
\nbeginning of a counternarrative,” write Oreskes and Conway, “that scientists
\nhad overreacted before, were overreacting now, and therefore couldn’t be
\ntrusted.”<\/p>\n
\ncounternarrative of denial continues today, stronger and more strident than
\never, and now focused on creating doubt about all aspects of climate change.
\nThe ultimate goal hasn’t changed since the tobacco days—preventing
\ngovernment regulation of industry. In a 2007 article<\/a>, Newsweek called the George C. Marshall
\nInstitute “a central cog in the denial machine.” GMI has received millions of
\ndollars from conservative foundations and corporations. Exactly how much isn’t
\nknown because in 2001, tired of facing criticism over the fact that one of the
\nlargest corporate donors to its anti-global warming work was oil giant
\nExxonMobil, GMI made its donor list secret.<\/p>\n
\ncontains a huge number of cogs, and it would take an encyclopedia to list them
\nall. The authors do an excellent job, however, of touching on many of the cogs
\ninside that dreadful box, from clueless writers (Bjorn
\nLomborg<\/a>, John
\nTierney<\/a>, George
\nWill<\/a>) to odious politicians (Sen. James Inhofe, Vice President Dick Cheney)
\nto the scores of conservative foundations that wrap themselves in the flag that
\nthey disgrace by their actions.<\/p>\n
\nHow important? If you read just one book on climate change this year, read Merchants of Doubt. And if you have time
\nto read two, reread Merchants of Doubt.<\/p>\n