The title of a 2010 book by Naomi
Oreskes (Professor of history and science studies at UC San Diego) and Erik
Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful
of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming,
pretty much tells the grim tale contained therein. Starting with the tobacco
industry’s decades-long fight to combat and obfuscate the science that they
knew to be true—that cigarettes cause a host of diseases including lung cancer;
and that even second-hand smoke causes the same suite of diseases to those who
breathe the smoke from others’ cigarettes—Oreskes and Conway provide the
details of how all other industries took their cue from the tobacco companies
and tried (with alarming success) to cast doubt on the real facts scientists
had unearthed about the dangers of acid rain, CFCs causing the ozone hole,
second-hand smoke, and most recently global warming from the human-caused
buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere. Here was the tobacco industry’s
key insight: that the normal uncertainty that is crucial to science could be
used
to
undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge…. “Doubt is our product,”
ran the infamous memo written by one tobacco industry executive in 1969, “since
it is the best method of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the
minds of the general public.” (34).
And what the industry and
administrations like those of Ronald Reagan and both Bushes have been able to
do is to recruit scientists themselves—including some distinguished ones—to
undermine the conclusions of the scientific majority who have been establishing
the dangers in some of the prime environmental hazards of our time. This
undermining work has led to doubt, delay and constant attack on the government
agencies that have tried to regulate these environmental hazards. As to why legitimate
scientists would want to smear the work of their colleagues, the reasons are
probably legion, but Oreskes and Conway identify what is probably the major
one: Find a scientist who sees environmental regulation as the road to
Socialism and/or Communism, and you can probably find a scientist who will
figure out clever ways to undermine what most other scientists agree are
established facts.
The
“scientists” who have played a major role in such nasty work are clearly
identified by Oreskes and Conway, and they include Fred Seitz, a physicist and
onetime president of the National Academy of Sciences who had worked on the
A-bomb project during WWII and who opposed everything from arms control to
peaceful coexistence with the Soviets; Fred Singer, also a physicist developing
Earth observation satellites and later a chief scientist in the Reagan
Administration and prime proponent of SDI or “Star Wars”; William Nierenberg,
also a physicist who had worked on the bomb and later served in the Reagan
White House; and Robert Jastrow, an astrophysicist who had worked on the space
program. All four were once termed “my scientists” by President George H.W.
Bush. Together, and with a few other colleagues and millions from corporate
coffers, they have managed to create the impression that there is a raging
debate about such established scientific facts as the harm done by tobacco
smoke, the devastation caused by the sulfur emissions that cause acid rain, the
ozone depletion caused by CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), and the global warming
caused by CO2. The harm and the probable deaths they have caused by
sowing the doubt that gives corporations cover is thus incalculable.
Merchants of Doubt tells us not only how
this has been done, but why it has
been done, and it is a story that will grey your hair if you care about the
planet we live on and the health of the humans who live on it with us. The main
outlines, though, are fairly simple and in many ways familiar. These guys are
zealots, most of whom ended their original scientific work years ago, and spent
their ‘twilight’ years cozying up to the power elite by attacking colleagues
whom they saw as threatening the American system of ‘free market capitalism’ through
research that would lead to regulation. Government regulation was, for most of
these true believers, the great socialist sin and anything or anyone that
called for it was little more than a subversive undermining the American way.
They hated the EPA in particular, but all environmentalists and regulatory
agencies in general, as well as anyone who opposed military preparedness (hence
their fondness for SDI or ‘Star Wars’). Here is what Fred Singer wrote in 1989,
for example, when he was arguing against measures to eliminate CFCs from the
atmosphere. First, he slandered the scientists who agreed on it (virtually all
of them) as “corrupt and motivated by self-interest and political ideology” (a
perfect description of Singer himself). Then he added that
“..there are probably those with hidden agendas of
their own—not just to ‘save the environment’ but to change our economic system…Some
of these ‘coercive utopians’ are socialists, some are technology-hating
Luddites; most have a great desire to regulate—on as large a scale as
possible.” (134).
In another article in 1991
concerning global warming, Singer reinforced this idea about the “hidden”
agenda of environmentalists, and the scientists who gave them their data: to
destroy capitalism and replace it with some sort of worldwide utopian Socialism
or Communism. It was to counteract this nefarious plot that Singer and Seitz
and their cronies in 1984 established the George C. Marshall Institute,
primarily to promote the so-called science of the Strategic Defense Initiative
even then being attacked by main line scientists as pie-in-the-sky nonsense, a
waste of money, and probably an incentive to a new and more dangerous arms
race. Of course the new Institute was touted as “promoting science for better
public policy,” but like the better known Team B of the Reagan Administration
(boasting such luminaries as Richard Perle, Richard Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz, and
other hawks), it was really designed to promote SDI and the underlying right-wing
view that “The Soviet Union is preparing for a Third World War as if it were
unavoidable..” (40).
To
understand how Singer and company operated, consider his efforts to undermine
the science on acid rain. You may remember that acid rain comes about when sulfur
and nitrogen emissions from electrical utilities, cars, and factories mix with
moisture in the atmosphere, and then fall as precipitation to poison lakes,
rivers, soils, and wildlife far from the polluting source. Twenty years of
meticulous studies led to a 1974 article in Science
magazine that summed up the danger: “Acid rain or snow is falling on most of
the northeastern United States” (68). The article went on to identify acid rain
as the product of burning coal and oil in tall smokestacks designed to remove
particles from the smoke in the Midwest—the unintended consequence being that
since the particles tended to neutralize acid, “removing them inadvertently
increased the acidity of the remaining pollution.” In short, tall smokestacks
had transformed local soot into the far more damaging and widespread acid rain.
In addition to falling in New England, that is, acid rain generated in the
Midwest was also falling in Canada, and the Canadian government had concluded
that most of its acid rain came from the United States. President Carter
agreed, and signed the Acid Precipitation Act of 1980, which established a
ten-year monitoring program to determine the impact of acid rain on both the
environment and human health. But then—Ronald Reagan was elected, and “his”
scientists began to pump up the doubts. In 1984, Congress simply rejected a
joint pollution control program with Canada. At about the same time, the Reagan
White House’s Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) commissioned its own
panel to review what the EPA had already
concluded about acid rain, i.e. that it was caused by coal-fired Midwest
plants. Bill Nierenberg was made chair of this commission, and managed to have some
of the major scientists who had already worked on acid rain included. They, not
surprisingly, concluded the same thing as the EPA: acid rain was caused by
man-made sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions. This might have concluded
the story, but for the fact that the White House had pushed for Fred Singer to
be on the Commission, and after the Executive Summary was generated, insisted
not only that Singer contribute an appendix, but also that the strongest
paragraphs of the summary, dealing with soil damage that could set off
devastating effects in the food chain, be deleted and that several other
paragraphs be presented in a different order. As Oreskes summarizes it:
Rather than start with the fact of the 25 million tons
of SO2 emissions per year, the White House wanted to start with a
statement that earlier actions taken under the Clean Air Act were a “prudent
first step,” and then proceed to the discussion about incomplete scientific
knowledge.” (87)
Fred Singer’s revisions were even
more damaging. He started by claiming that acid deposition was “a serious
problem, but not a life-threatening one.” He then summarized the main points from
his point of view, i.e. that the science was uncertain, that more research was
needed, that the economic consequences of controlling acid rain, even if it did
exist, would be too great, and that acid rain might be cause by natural sources
after all. In short, Singer and the White House had drastically altered the
conclusions of the scientific experts who had written the original draft, and
they had done it without ever consulting those scientists—who were, almost to a
man, outraged. The most authoritative scientist on acid rain, Gene Likens,
wrote to Bill Nierenberg that “My understanding is that these unapproved changes
in the Executive Summary originated with the White House/OSTP. Frankly, I find
such meddling to be less than honest and extremely distasteful” (99), an
objection that may not sound like much, but which, from a scientist, is
devastating.
The
damage was done however. As the report began to surface, a House subcommittee
considering legislation on acid rain voted in May 1983: the vote was 10 to 9 against the legislation, thus killing
congressional action. Nor would there be any legislation addressing acid rain
during the rest of Ronald Reagan’s terms in office, as the administration
continued to insist that not only were the causes unknown, but the proposed
fixes were too expensive: “a billion-dollar solution to a million-dollar
problem.” The George H.W. Bush administration would finally, under pressure,
amend the Clean Air Act to set up emissions trading (cap and trade), resulting
in a 54% decline in SO2 levels between 1990 and 2007. But further
research, especially by Gene Likens and his colleagues, determined that the
problem had not been solved at all.
Writing in 1999, Likens said: “Acid rain still exists, and its ecological
effects have not gone away.” In fact, things had gotten worse: not only had the
forest stopped growing, but it was in fact shrinking.
He predicted that the legendary sugar maple was “dying…[and] scientific
research suggests that by 2076, the 300th birthday of the United
States, sugar maples will be extinct in large areas of the northern forest”
(104). Thus, this first use of ‘cap and trade’ to stop an industry-caused
environmental threat failed utterly to even stabilize things.
Fred
Singer and his diabolical cronies went on to attack the EPA, the damage to the
ozone by CPCs, the dangers of second-hand smoke, and even Rachel Carson (for the
alleged deadly damage to world health done by getting DDT banned, thereby
sparing malaria-carrying mosquitoes and causing 50 million unnecessary deaths!),
as well as the threat from global warming. Regarding global warming, for
example, the first Marshall Institute report on this subject blamed global warming on the sun, which
was changing and sending more heat our way.
What
Oreskes concludes, however, is that far from accomplishing their aim to ridicule
and delegitimize environmentalists out to ‘destroy free markets and
capitalism,’ the merchants of doubt have in fact led even former allies to
consider more seriously the fact that “free enterprise can bring real
costs—profound costs—that the free market does not reflect.” Such ‘externalized
costs,’ imposed by the damage done by DDT and a host of other pesticides and
herbicides, SO2 in rain, cigarette smoke, CFCs eating the ozone, and
CO2 creating the greenhouse effect, are
all
market failures. They are instances where serious damage was done and the free
market seemed unable to account for it, much less prevent it. Government
intervention was required. This is why the market ideologues and old Cold
Warriors joined together to fight them.
(237-8)
As more and more people, including
former free-marketeers, begin to realize this, argues Oreskes, they become less
able to deny that major changes are required in how governments, regulators,
and corporations conduct their business. Thus the final irony: the one thing
that the merchants of doubt dreaded most—what they saw as the advance of bleeding-heart
socialist regulation—must increasingly, under the pressure of real science and
looming environmental calamity, come to pass. If it does not, if the merchants
of doubt prevail for much longer, we will all go down with their badly-leaking
free-market Titanic.
Lawrence DiStasi
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