Speaker: Climate denial is more about marketing than the facts
By David DeWitt11 hrs ago
The person who wrote the book on climate change denialism delivered a speech Friday at Ohio University on how so many people have been persuaded for so long that climate change hasn’t been happening while scientists have been telling the public that it has.
Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science and affiliated professor of Earth and environmental studies at Harvard University, co-authored “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.”
Speaking at the Schoonover College of Communication, Oreskes cited several consultants who worked for tobacco companies to sow seeds of doubt around the dangers of smoking, who then later worked for organizations promoting climate-change denial.
These same people, Oreskes said, also had backgrounds of denying the reality of acid rain, rejecting the severity of the hole in the Earth’s ozone layer, and rebuffing the environmental impacts of the insecticide DDT.
She noted that the consultants in question – Frederick Seitz, a consultant to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco; Robert Jastrow, an astrophysicist; and William Nierenberg, a nuclear physicist – all had strong connections to science.
“So we realized doing our research that it was not remotely possible these men didn’t understand science,” Oreskes said. “This was not a problem of scientific illiteracy.”
Rather, she said, it’s been a concerted effort to manifest what she called Potemkin village, or “facsimile” science, that mimics and parades as the real thing while acting only to falsely claim that the science is uncertain or unsettled, thereby planting doubt.
In fact, Oreskes said, carbon dioxide has been known to be a greenhouse gas since the 1850s; evidence of increased CO2 was available as early as the 1930s; scientists were beginning to warn the public in the 1950s; hard measurements of CO2 increases were public in the 1960s; by 1988 U.S. Congress received authoritative testimony with 99 percent certainty that climate change was detectable; and by 1995 there was international consensus among climate scientists that man-made climate change was underway.
Oreskes drew a line to connect Seitz’ work for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco and the strategy used to deny climate-change science, noting that the R.J. Reynolds strategy was one of “doubt-mongering” by insisting the science on smoking was unsettled and by asserting that it was premature to act to control tobacco use.
She cited a tobacco industry report in 1969 that quoted one executive as saying, “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.”
The playbook, as Oreskes called it, is to claim the science is unsettled and that there is no consensus, to allege that there are many causes of the phenomenon in question, to claim that fixing the problem would be too expensive, kill jobs and wreck the economy, and finally to claim that fixing the problem would destroy personal freedom.
Oreskes said that the argument isn’t really about science, however. She said it’s an argument against government intervention in the marketplace, against regulation.
She said The Wall Street Journal has been a major source of challenges to climate science, quoting an opinion piece from Republican strategist Frank Luntz in which he said, “Once we concede that greenhouse gases must be controlled, it will only be a matter of time before we end up endorsing more economically damaging regulation.”
She said this argument was once just as convenient for the tobacco industry as it is today for the fossil-fuel industry. She cited the history of the handful of deniers who originally sowed the seeds of doubt working as physicists during the Cold War and how to them, defending the free market was an extension of their work.
“Their argument was that government regulation is the slippery slope to socialism, a back door to communism,” she said. “In their writings, contrarians frequently assert that environmentalists – and by implication scientists working on environmental issues – are socialists and communists seeking to control our lives.”
She noted that in 2016, all Republican candidates for the U.S. presidency have expressed doubt about the scientific conclusions on man-made climate change. Donald Trump, she said, has called it the “global warming hoax created by and for the Chinese,” which drew a laugh from the audience.
The assertion that the U.S. environmental movement has so-called “Red roots,” she said, is false, citing the environmental activism of progressive Republicans Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot as well as Standard Oil Executive John D. Rockefeller.
From the 1910s to the 1970s, she noted, bipartisan consensus existed on the importance of environmental protection including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the federal Water Pollution Control Act.
President Richard Nixon, Oreskes pointed out, signed extensions of those acts and created the federal Environmental Protection Agency by executive order in 1970.
But in the 1980s, she said, the administration of President Ronald Reagan, under the advice of free-market economist Milton Friedman, began to argue for less government and less regulation.
Problems including climate change, acid rain and the hole in the ozone demonstrated the need for government intervention in the marketplace, Oreskes said. This put scientific evidence on a collision course with conservative free-market ideology.
We are still traveling that collision course today, she said, because admitting the reality of climate change, like the reality of the effects of tobacco use, means admitting the reality of market failure.
“This is why climate scientists have been attacked. It wasn’t economists who discovered these market failures,” she said. “It was scientists doing science.”
This means admitting that governance is needed to remedy market failure, she said, adding that if we fail to act, we face even worse economic consequences.
“The costs of climate change are so great that they threaten the very prosperity that economic activity is intended to generate,” she said.
She said that climate change is the biggest fight of all, bigger than acid rain, the ozone hole and tobacco.
Those problems, she said, were addressed by expanding the role of the government in the marketplace, and yet “we did not find ourselves living in a Soviet-style dictatorship.”
And we can move past such fear-mongering, she said, by recognizing the problem of “facsimile science,” and not giving bunk assertions “equal time” with real science; by recognizing that the exaggerated claims from the private sector that government intervention threatens essential freedom are really just a strategy to protect profits; and by focusing on solutions.
“The whole point of climate-change denial, like tobacco denial, is to deny the problem to avoid implementing solutions,” Oreskes said. “The most important thing we can do is to focus on solutions, not get mired in debates about the reality of the problems.”
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