Notes from Oreskes "Merchants of Doubt" interview

See Tamino's post for the excellent (34 min) interview & a discussion thereof. Here are my notes from watching:

Marshall Institute was originally founded (by 3) to defend SDI (star wars)
The idea of demanding equal time - Seitz learned it from tobacco industry
They came from cold war rocketry programs

It's not overt corruption; no $ from corporate supporters at all, originally. Initially a modest budget, just the 3 of them; tactics were writing letters to editors, also including threatening to sue, e.g. a public radio station for equal time;
Their original $ came from foundations. Later that shifted...
They believed what they were pushing. It's a story of error, but not of corruption.

They believed passionately that the Soviet Union was a serious threat.
The pathology is what happens when the cold war ends, 5 yrs after GMI's founding. So then they're at a loss for what to do...but (the pathology of a life spent fighting) they couldn't stop fighting. 1989 (the year Berlin wall comes down) their new enemy is environmentalism. Now it's made explicitly (enviros=commies!)

Ironically, the environmental movement in the u.s. was created by progressive republicans... pinchot, roosevelt, rockefeller - hardly a communist.

Their projection of a certain sort of cold war anticommunist anxiety onto a group of people whose historical roots are actually not left wing at all.
Environmentalism begins to be leftwing after Nixon because of the issue of regulation - it's no longer land conservation/preservation, becomes regulating business activity - now the business community/hard right wing of the Republican party begins to align itself against environmentalism & against regulation.

This is where they make the link to communism - saying slippery slope, just a matter of time...

Tobacco - their (messaging) target is the public, but they use science to do it -
attack the science (dishonest) since if people think the science is unsettled, they'll think it's premature to impose regulations.

Doubtmongering - a very clever campaign. Tobacco PR told their scientists "don't lie, you don't have to"
16:22

Yet to be an agnostic in the face of 50 years of overwhelming scientific data...that should be suspicious to people, that should be fishy

In 1990s fossil fuel industry starts to make common cause, funnel money into these institutes.
Surprising how many things the tobacco industry funded that had nothing to do with tobacco. Many antireg. causes - e.g. for Calif's prop. 13
Philip Morris "philanthropy" in 1995 - money for all kinds of think tanks, grassroots antitax orgs, etc - "Von Mises cultural foundation" (v.m. was Austrian aristocrat, founder of modern neoliberalism, bent on minimizing govt intervention)

22:28 The "thousands of scientists doubt global warming" claims - they're not *climate* scientists. Plus a petition is preposterous, it's a political tool. Science proceeds by collecting data, conferences, discussion/review by peers, publication in journals. If you want to know what the sci evidence is, you need to go to the peer reviewed literature - as N.O. did.
All studies done of it (peer reviewed climate science literature) come to same conclusion - that in the peer reviewed science literature, essentially there's no debate that climate change is underway and largely driven by human activities. But you wouldn't know that from the way it's covered in the press.

While the original GMI founders are dead, a new generation has continued - incl willie soon at harvard smithsonian observatory.
Greenpeace recently looked at his funding - $1m for research from fossil fuel industry

Because it's become more overt, it's easier to follow the $$

Two tobacco PR strategies
1. met w hill & knowlton - strategy: challenge the scientific data
2. targeting the media, with fair & balanced "present both sides" argument

even edward r. murrow was suckered in, presented a "balanced view" of tobacco

Supply side; provide "informational" materials to journalists.
"Demand side": put pressure on journalists - say "fairness doctrine requires..." - shockingly effective, it tapped into journos' own value system
(take those things & exploit them)

Lion's share of blame goes to the perpetrators. But journos could have asked tough questions, and scientists could have stood up. As for the public: we'd prefer the perpetrators' story was true, it's the good news story.

31:40 Scientists: "we knew it was garbage so we just ignored it" - that strategy is not effective. They didn't want to get dragged into the mud.

But if no cogent response, the public thinks there's something to it.