Merchants of Doubt is a book about an orchestration of obfuscation and doubt concerning some of the most pressing environmental issues in the history of humanity. Ever wonder why nothing is getting done about global warming? Why the public, despite overwhelming evidence, cannot accept the obvious reality of climate change and continues to dismiss it and revel in the status quo and business-as-usual. The answer lies in this book.
There have been several pivotal environmental issues that have impacted the health and welfare of people and the planet such as tobacco use (smoking), acid rain, the ozone hole, dangerous pesticides, and global warming. Since addressing these problems steps on the toes of vested economic interests and implies a failure of the market, partisan political and scientific operatives and free market fundamentalists come out of the woodwork to cloud the picture and confuse the public into believing that no problem actually exists and that more study is needed before doing anything. Action gets stifled for decades. Damages accumulate as greed translates into public policy that staves off any needed regulations or transformation of technology. For decades a concerted plan to peddle doubt and stave off the truth about the harmful health effects of cigarette smoking caused the needless suffering and early deaths of millions of people who were confused about the real dangers of smoking. It was the same for acid rain, CFCs (ozone destroyers), dangerous pesticides like DDT, and now global warming. In each instance, necessary action was delayed for decades causing enormous health and environmental costs. In the case of global warming, because of this concerted plan to sow doubt and confusion, the public cannot accept the fact that it is happening - thus delaying action for decades to a point where the planet has probably already passed a tipping point in which civilization cannot be saved.
We find that the Merchants of Doubt, because of their ideological imperative and ties to powerful economic interests like big tobacco and fossil fuels, have contrived and implemented a consistent plan to withstall any action to address global warming. The corporate media has been complicit in all this.
The vested economic interests have used scientists to peddle their doubt. These scientists all have something in common. They have close ties to the military industrial complex and corporate polluters in a nexus where government and corporation unite. They are staunch anti-communist cold warriors and free market fundamentalists. They are political conservatives. They oppose any environmental regulations that might alter the status quo or impede profits of giant corporations. Certain names are prominent throughout the book: Sanger, Seitz, Nierenberg, and Jastrow. These scientists were all involved in the dismissal of science in regards to tobacco smoke, acid rain, ozone depletion, and global warming. They are mostly physicists, not climatologists or biologists, with ties to big oil, big tobacco, and big defense contractors. The media legitimizes them when they are nothing but schills for big corporate polluters who want to maintain the status quo and their profits. No regulation is acceptable to them. If you want to know the truth about this concerted stratagem to deceive the public and the machinations of these anti-environmental scientists in doing so, you need to read Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.
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