After Gutenberg

jcwinnie

And, speaking of tobacco tactics, Climate Progress guest blogger John Atcheson wrote a review of Merchants of Doubt.

Merchants of Doubt exposes a cult of denial that confronted virtually every major public health and environmental initiative during the past 60 years. A non-fiction account, it has parallels to fictional literature that describe a cabal composed of a few designing persons, whose designs have far-reaching consequences. CP commentator Jeff Hugguns said that that the book played down media complicity.

In Merchants of Doubt Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway take us on a fascinating trip down what they call Tobacco Road. Take the journey with them, and you’ll see renowned scientists abandon science, you’ll see environmentalism equated with communism, and you’ll discover the connection between the Cold War and climate denial.

And for the most part, you’ll be entertained along the way.

Oreskes and Conway are historians who focus on science. What they do best is to sort through history’s discarded headlines and peak into the nooks and crannies of scientific literature to weave together their tale and to reveal the hypocrisy and hubris of a few scientists who show up again and again in contrarian positions against established science.

The trip exposes an unlikely link between Manhattan project scientists and the cult of denial that confronted virtually every major public health and environmental initiative of the last sixty years.

The original villains in this story are Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, William Nierenberg, and Robert Jastrow – physicists all. Sietz and Neirenberg had been involved in building the atomic bomb, and both had worked on other weapons programs. Nierenberg had been the Director of the Scripps Institute and Jastrow, an astrophysicist, had headed up The Goddard Institute for Space Studies and he’d been a successful author of books popularizing space. Singer was a virtual rocket scientist and he had been the first Director of the National Weather Satellite Service. Seitz had been President of the National Academy of Sciences. Each had worked with or for the Reagan administration.

Oreskes and Conway set the table by giving the impressive credentials of these distinguished scientists then asking:

Why would scientists dedicated to uncovering the truth about the natural world deliberately misrepresent the work of their colleagues? Why would they spread accusations with no basis? Why would they not correct their arguments once they had been shown to be incorrect? And why did the press continue to quote them, year after year, even as their claims were shown, one after another, to be false?

Just as Yali’s question sets up Jarred Diamond’s inquiry in Guns Germs and Steel, these questions animate the discussion in the rest of this book.

The authors trace these scientists through the original denier/delayer effort — the cynical “Doubt is our Product” campaign of the tobacco industry, to the current climate denier campaign, with stops at the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), Acid Rain, the Ozone Hole, the second hand smoke issue, and a swipe at Rachel Carson for good measure. Along the way, they accumulate fellow travelers such as Lomborg, Lindzen, Michaels, a host of neoclassical economists ready to discount the future down to or near zero, and of course, Conservative politicians.

Each of these campaigns could fit the same template: seemingly credible scientists, conservative think tanks (some created just for the campaigns), allied with industry, lubricated liberally with money and PR savvy, and leavened with a conviction that the ends justified the means. This explains why talented scientists willingly jettisoned the scientific method.

And what was the end that justified this extreme behavior?

An almost religious conviction in small government and the potential evils of big government; a doctrinaire belief in unconstrained free markets and the purity of capitalism; and the conviction that “environmentalism” and other do-gooder efforts threatened our free market, capitalistic system.

Oreskes and Conway show why cold warriors saw threats to their brand of uber-capitalism as threats to the United States, and they show how environmentalism came to be seen by them as “green on the outside, but red on the inside.” The evolution of the Marshall Institute from SDI defender to Exxon-funded climate denier is particularly illustrative.

Climate scientists themselves come in for part of the blame. As the authors point out, while Singer et. al. and their allies from corporations and think tanks cast their disinformation and misinformation directly to the people, the press and politicians, the climate scientists, for the most part, spoke quietly among themselves.

No disinformation campaign can succeed without the cooperation of the press, and the authors provide some egregious examples of how the press in general, and such conservative organs as the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times in particular, printed long discredited information and baseless personal attacks, and declined to print rebuttals or retractions when the errors were pointed out.

The book is not without flaws. For example, while they document the press’s individual failures, they don’t hold the discipline as a whole to account to the extent that the media deserves. For example, consider the following statement:

In creating the appearance of science, the merchants of doubt sold a plausible story about scientific debate. They created a Potemkin Village populated, in only a few cases, with actual scientists. A reasonable journalist, not to mention the ordinary citizens, could be forgiven for having been fooled.

Really? Their tactics were crude, the lies obvious, and the truth knowable with only a cursory web search. If the press was “fooled,” it was because they were either hopeless slackers, or they wanted to be fooled.

The authors also describe the scientific method in a manner that makes it sound like a popularity contest. Their almost exclusive focus on peer reviews and peer consensus ignores the critical role of testable hypotheses and empirical observation. In the end, it is the quality and reproducibility of the data that speaks, and it forms the basis for the peer reviews. In their prescription for ‘A New View of Science,” they repeat this perspective, saying, “What counts as knowledge are the ideas that are accepted by the fellowship of experts …” This is a slippery slope, in which old theories never die and new ones could be subject to the whims of the times.

In the end, the authors correctly note that what motivates deniers is political ideology, not science. As CP’s Joe Romm put it in Hell and High Water, the reason most political conservatives and libertarians deny the reality of human-induced climate change is that they simply cannot stand the solution. So they attack both the solution and the science.

Despite its small flaws, Merchants is an impressive and disturbing piece of scholarship that does a good job of answering the questions they pose. It should be read by every editor and every member of Congress, and by climate scientists as well.

Here is a terrific talk by Oreskes:

jcwinnie

Van Jones sounded a warning similar to the one above by David Roberts. “As the U.S. Senate prepares to debate clean energy / climate legislation,” informs Jones, “some utility companies are quietly pushing a crazy idea.”

In exchange for cutting their carbon emissions, power plants want to undermine the EPA and get permission to increase other kinds of dangerous pollution. They even want the go-ahead to dump more sulfur and deadly mercury into our air and water.

This literal “poison pill” proposal would turn progress in climate protection into a devastating setback for the health of all Americans — especially for those who live near power plants. The dirty energy lobby hopes that America can be convinced to accept more poison to get less carbon.

Fortunately, national leaders began sounding the alarm last week. Grist’s David Roberts took a break from vacation to alert the nation, calling the utility companies’ backroom play potentially the “scam of the century.”

Green For All’s Phaedra Ellis Lamkins and the NAACP’s Ben Jealous put the matter bluntly, stating: “[B]ig utility companies apparently are making unconscionable demands that threaten the health and safety of all Americans.” Green For All immediately launched an online campaign to kill this nutty notion before it mutates into a legislative proposal.

American policy can be smart enough to protect both our children and our grandchildren.

And, now Gritz Jonathan Hiskes says the Climate Bill is dead… really dead. Gosh, do you think there was enough ethics remaining among the ear-tagged to stop themselves from doing more harm in the service of their fossil-fuel masters?

Na-a-a, more likely, they are savvy enough to avoid negative media exposure while the BP oil disaster remains in the news, preempting the most recent Massey coal disaster, before the coal ash impoundments broke, etc., etc., etc. And, those allocating the big money can count the demise of the climate bill as money well invested.

jcwinnie

And speaking of catty, Kate Shepperd tells that Gale Norton, former President George W. Bush’s first Secretary of the Interior, was one of two Bush-era Interior secretaries who testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Norton “ran the department during the time when its Minerals Management Service was guilty of some of its worst excesses—including holding cocaine and meth-fueled sex and oil parties.”

This was the first time representatives from the previous administration have been put on the hot-seat about the regulatory miscues that may have led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Current Secretary Ken Salazar joined Norton (who served in the role from January 2001 to March 2006) and Dirk Kempthorne (June 2006 to January 2009) before the panel.

In her opening statement, Norton accused critics of the Interior Department of vilifying the Minerals Management Service (now renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement). "There has been a great deal of media attention to the ethics of MMS. It pains me to see the vilification of MMS and its employees. I want to speak in defense of the vast majority of hardworking and professional men and women of the Minerals Management Service," said Norton in her prepared opening statement.

Now, it was under Norton’s watch that many of the porn, meth, and oil parties took place at the MMS’ Lake Charles, La. office. Oh, and the sex, oil, and cocaine parties at the Lakewood, Colorado office. And Norton, who went to work for Shell Oil shortly after leaving office, has been the subject of a Department of Justice criminal investigation into whether she illegally used her position at DOI to benefit the company that would hire her soon thereafter (that probe is said to be wrapping up soon, with no charges against Norton).

Norton did at least address the Inspector General reports on sex and drugs at MMS, though she claimed it was only a "handful of employees" who blatantly violated gift limitations and other conflict of interest requirements.  She acknowledged that "[t]heir actions were wrong and unacceptable," but downplayed the extent of the problem:

These employees were disciplined, and I join in condemning their misconduct. But MMS has over 1700 employees.  The very few misbehaving employees have been blown out of proportion to create a public image of the MMS as a merry band of rogue employees seeking favors from industry.  The public servants I encountered were entirely different from that impression.

jcwinnie

Hoping to put a positive spin on what remains of the clean energy package Senate aides note “that it at least does not include any of the really bad measures… including major incentives for coal and nuclear power and the elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases.” Well, “Wait, It Gets Worse” Kate, here’s hoping that the ear-tagged can get through this session without doing more harm.

jcwinnie

And, speaking of When You Wish upon a Star, America’s Wetland Foundation is spreading a petition accompanied by a video starring Sandra Bullock, Dave Matthews, Lenny Kravitz, Emeril Lagassi, John Goodman, Harry Shearer, Peyton and Eli Manning, Drew Brees and others.

Bendan DeMelle and Jerry Cope tell us that America’s Wetland Foundation is a front group for oil companies including BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Citgo, Chevron and other polluters. They are using AWF (“America’s WETLAND Foundation”) and a Louisiana women’s group called Women of the Storm “to spread the message that U.S. taxpayers should pay for the damage caused by BP to Gulf Coast wetlands, and that the reckless offshore oil industry should continue drilling for the “wholesale sustainability” of the region.”

jcwinnie

“BP (BP, the Co-Trustee) responded to a request from the Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce that asked the company to report how much money it had shelled out on advertising after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April.” The answer HuffPoz knows: BP advertising budget TRIPLED during the Spill; it neared $100 million. That’s a lot of chitlins, boopsie.