The modern era of fighting facts with doubt began on Dec. 15, 1953.
Months earlier, landmark research from Sloan-Kettering showed cigarette tar gave mice fatal cancers, and the attention was widespread. The research wasn’t even groundbreaking. In the 1930s, Nazi scientists documented cigarette dangers — but, you know, they were Nazis, so polite Allied researchers weren’t keen to rely on them. That’s why this new research from a credible American institution was so damning.
To combat this, the tobacco industry met at a New York hotel that day to decide to actively discredit the research. Not engage in it, not to adapt the product but just to muddy the waters. A now infamous internal trade memo in 1969 said “doubt is our product.” This strategy was then repeated again and again. It was employed by organizations such as the Marshall Institute, which pushed for the “balanced” coverage of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, also known as “Star Wars”) and climate change. That’s what one-time Trump ally Steve Bannon meant when he advised political campaigns to “flood the zone with shit.”
This work and the men behind it is the focus of the influential 2010 book “Merchants of Doubt,” written by by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes and made into a movie. discusses the tactics used by various organizations to challenge scientific consensus and sow doubt in the minds of the general public, with a focus on the tobacco and defense industries. It highlights the dangers of giving equal weight to both sides of an issue, regardless of the strength of the evidence supporting each side.
More than a decade later the book is enlightening, My notes from the book are below.
Notes:
- Adlai Stevenson wrote “the trouble with Americans is that they haven’t read the minutes of the previous meeting.”
- Heritage Foundation published articles like this to discredit climate science
- Climate researcher Ben Santer was attacked in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal by climate deniers the “Freds: (Seitz and Singer) who went from tobacco to other lobby efforts (Background)
- Bad Science: a resource book
- Fred singer also challenged Sherwood Rowland on ozone research; Justin Lancaster was sued for trying to correct
- May 9, 1979 Seitz brought in by RJ Reynolds to launch research
- Modern era of fighting facts began on December 15, 1953. Months earlier Sloan-Kettering showed cigarette tar gave mice fatal cancers, got lots of press attention. German scientists in 1930s knew this was bad; Nazis ran anti smoking campaigns and hitler didn’t tolerate smoking (15)
- That day, four large American tobacco companies (American Tobacco, Benson and Hedges, Phillip Morris and US Tobacco) met in the Arbor Plaza Hotel in NYC. They met with John Hill of Hill & Knowlton. (RJ Reynolds and Brown and Williamson had also agreed to participate). These were just “sensational accusations” to refute
- The new Tobacco Industry Research Committee actively lobbies news organizations that they needed to present both sides of the tobacco fight: they met with staff at Time, Newsweek, US NEWS and World REPORT, Businessweek, Life and Readers Digest. In summer 1954, they met with Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Helen Roger’s Reid (Herald Tribune), Jack Howard Scripps; Roy Larsen (Alice) and William Randolph Hearst
- Eugenicist CC Little led the committee and sent 175k copies of “A Scientific Perspective on the Cigarette Controversy” to doctors and 15,000 to journalists and congressmen to throw disingenuous questions
- Journalists torn by 1949 Fairness Doctrine established along with rise of TV. Though it was for TV not print, most followed for big issues and tobacco was being perceived as a big debate
- “Balance was interpreted it seems as giving equal weight to both sides, rather than giving accurate weight to both sides.” 19
- Edward Murrow did balance on tobacco but no balance between Hitler and Churchill
- The landmark 1964 surgeon general report
- Tobacco industry started arguing they were the start of a slippery slope (saying the feds would stop liquor advertising though the FCC expressly said they wouldn’t)
- By the mid 1980s, tobacco spent $100m on research, second only to federal government
- Most people who smoke won’t get cancer and that remaining uncertainties was a longtime defender of these cases
- Science is always uncertain and direct causes are messy: statistical cause or likelihood is different than direct cause
- Famous 1969 tobacco memo: “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”
- Seitz hated the scientific community and communism so instead he trusted private enterprise. He took the tobacco campaign of challenging science and muddling facts through issues 35
- Seitz leapt into strategic defense, challenging the dovish scientists following nuclear war and battling Nixonian detente. Seitz was hawkish and believed nuclear war could be won; attacked Carl Sagan who challenged the logic. Plan B research led to the Regan Star Wars and other anti communist militarization. Opposed growing nuclear arms freeze movement
- (Side note: Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series reminds me of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose; these were early influencer campaigns)
- Sagan and nuclear winter concept inspired by research into the dinosaur-slaying asteroid
- TTAPS
- Sagan’s promotion of climate advocacy in Parade magazine with extreme numbers was seen as propaganda beyond what a scientist should do. Kerry Emanuel and others said nuclear winter was extreme case and not good science: Did Sagan fall into propaganda?
- Paul Ehlrich’s “population bomb” concept was viewed as also environmental left extremism
- Invoking the Fairness Doctrine, Marshall institute pushed journalists to cover both sides of strategic defense. In 1986, public television stations were going to air program on the strategic defense initiative which Robert Jastrow considered “one-sided.” 6500 scientist signed a petition against STI and in contrast the Marshall Institute only consisted of Jastrow and a small number of colleagues, so was the fairness doctrine supposed to require equal time for an equal views? (57)
- William Broad and Nicholas Wade: Betrayers of Truth
- Hubbard Brook Experimental forest : It led to the discovery of acid rain
- Preservationist environmentalism was bipartisan, but by Reagan there was a split
- Scientist focus on the frontier of their research to discover new answers but this isn’t very helpful for determining public policy (75)
- Seitz, Teller, Nierenberg hated environmentalists as being politically motivated, especially for their opposition to nuclear power
- Famous physicists are sometimes in error but never in doubt (old adage)
- Garrett Hardin: tragedy of the commons
- 1970s a real reckoning that humans reached tipping point: we were shaking the environment
- “It is easier to calculate the cost of a pollution control device than the value of the environment is intended to protect“ 84
- Fred Singer acid rain: discount rate on the future and he didn’t want to assign any values to ecological damage (just cost of pollution)
- Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom argued his “neighborhood effects” like pollution would be best solved by market forces, to which Singer agreed
- The “science isn’t in” of tobacco was used again for acid rain, enlisted media. They argued acid rain was a billion dollar solution for a million dollar problem but the opposite ended up being true
- David Hounshell: Regulation is the mother of invention
- 1970 release of MIT study, SCEP: “ men’s impact on the global environment“ found ozone layer
- Aerosol industry starts new countering research
- Ozone depletion was success , Donald Hodel was perfect foil
- But Fred Singer and others used a brief water vapor hypothesis to discredit science even if that’s natural science pathway. Singer’s three fold criticism: science was incomplete, replacing CFCs would be expensive and scientists were biased (129)
- George Orwell wrote that environmentalism was “a green tree with red roots”
- With secondhand smoke Fred Singer and team discredited EPA overall not just the science
- Second hand smoke research by Hirayama discredited by critics who pushed journalists to cover criticism
- Sylvester Stallone was paid $500k to use cigarettes in five feature films
- Bad Science: a resource book from tobacco industry, with Daniel Singer’s work
- Michael Fumento Investor’s Business Daily: took $60k from Monsanto without disclosing
- The overall strategy: battle science with (paid for) scientists, write op-ed’s and then quote those op ed’s
- The Science Mob in New Republic followed David Baltimore false research
- They targeted individual journalists whom they thought mightn’t sympathetic: Nicholas Wade NYT, PJ O’Rourke Rolling Stone, Greg Easterbrook at New Republic
- Milloy junkscience.com
- TASSC. created the sound science in journalism award first granted to New York Times reporter Gina Kolata
- These scientists argued regulation was the road to socialism
- Isaiah Berlin: Liberty for wolves means death to lamb
- “There are many reasons why the United States has failed to act on global warming but at least one is the confusion raised by Bill Nierenberg, Fred Seitz and Fred Singer” (170)
- 1978 national climate act
- Nierenberg climate report: physical scientists all said climate was bad; economists in first and last chapters said but by discounting we shouldn’t act but just research, treat symptoms not causes. Technology will create solutions . Major early distraction
- Revelle In late life was used to give legitimacy to a Fred Singer paper delaying climate action; that used to criticize Al Gore’s environmental positions
- WSJ routinely published op-ed’s criticizing climate science
- Max and Jules Boykoff media assessment found giving both sides to established climate science
- 1988 Bush was engaging with climate, by July 1997, Byrd-Hagel got 97-0 support to oppose Kyoto Protocol
- Rachel Carson and Silent Spring a success, but the banning of DDT also attacked by anti regulation. Argument goes that without DDT many more have died of malaria etc but in reality DDT use peaked in US in 1959, 13 years before the ban. DDT wasn’t just used as “indoor residual spraying” as is best but widespread agricultural spraying which speeds insect immunity . Also ban was only in US
- Carson’s argument: we will lose any war with nature. She was challenged because a technoutopism and anthropoceism
- Nixon supported EPA because it was good politics
- “The shift in the American environmental movement from aesthetic environmentalism to regulatory environmentalism wasn’t just a change in political strategy. It was the manifestation of a crucial realization: that unrestricted commercial activity was doing damage – real, lasting, pervasive damage.” (237)
- But this acknowledged a shortcoming of free market. These anti science people (Dixie Ray another one) saw a communist lesson: ends justify the means, and they fought what they perceived as anti capitalism environmentalism
- Tocqueville on American debate “a confused clamor rises on every side, and a thousand voices are heard at once”
- “Balance had become a form of bias” 243
- Iraq War followed this same playbook
- Historian Robert Proctor showed tobacco created newsletters and journals to prop up false claims (Tobacco and Health; Indoor air quality)
- TechCentralStation funded by ExxonMobil
- Steve Millay is a Fox News contributor who has been funded by Exxon Mobil
- Market doubt
- Cornucopians and Julian Simon: technology will save us (like climate change), viewed themselves as responding to Malthus who thought population would boom and technology couldn’t keep up
- Bjørn Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist book misuses stats and is a Cornucopians. Danish government said it wasn’t scientifically dishonest because it wasn’t science
- Sputnik and US Army Ordnance spent 50 years on interoperational parts: centralized government can do incredible things
- Understanding scientific Reasoning: Giere et Al: with uncertain information it is often better to do nothing (academic decision theory)
- “The very features that create expertise in a specialized domain lead to ignorance in many others.” (273)
- Shakespeare warned that life could be reduced to “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” 274
