Late last month Senator James M. Inhofe,
Republican of Oklahoma, brandished a snowball on the Senate floor,
suggesting that the ugly winter weather afflicting the Eastern Seaboard
was evidence that global warming is a hoax. This moment of political theater was widely ridiculed (by Jon Stewart and others), but “Merchants of Doubt,”
Robert Kenner’s informative and infuriating new documentary, ought to
remind us that the denial of climate change is hardly a joke.
And
those who promote it — in the news media, in political discourse, in
serious-looking reports published by dubious think tanks — are anything
but fools. “Merchants of Doubt,” based on Naomi Oreskes and Erik M.
Conway’s book of the same title, examines the history of
corporate-financed public relations efforts to sow confusion and
skepticism about scientific research. The filmmakers interview
scientists, activists and whistle-blowers who have tried to expose such
activities, as well as some of its perpetrators, repentant and
otherwise.
“If
you can ‘do tobacco,’ ” one of the perpetrators is quoted as saying,
“you can do just about anything in public relations.” The reference is
to the long campaign to obfuscate and undermine attempts to make the
public aware of the dangers of cigarettes. As early as the 1950s,
tobacco companies were aware — thanks to their own research — that their
products were hazardous and habit forming, but they waged a prolonged
and frequently successful campaign to suppress and blur the facts. Their
tactics included sending dubiously credentialed experts out into the
world to disguise dishonesty as reasonable doubt. “We just don’t know.”
“The science is complicated.” “We need more research.”
The
pro-tobacco strategy also called for smearing critics and invoking
noble ideals like personal freedom against inconvenient facts like
nicotine addiction. Thanks to thousands of pages of documents leaked to
Stanton A. Glantz, a doctor and anti-tobacco crusader, the scale and the
details of the deception are well known. The image of tobacco company
executives taking an oath at a congressional hearing and proceeding to
lie about what they knew is part of the collective memory. It also
opened the door to lawsuits that led, in 1998, to the Tobacco Master
Settlement Agreement.
“Merchants of Doubt” links cigarettes and climate — with a fascinating and troubling detour into an investigation by The Chicago Tribune
of the flame-retardant industry — by noting that both the playbook and
many of the players are the same. “I’m not a scientist,” a recently
adopted catchphrase among Republican politicians, echoes earlier
evocations of complication and confusion. In both cases the science
could hardly be clearer, but pseudo-experts can be brought before the
cameras to peddle the idea that no real consensus exists. False
information need not be coherent to be effective, and the specters of
vanished liberty and tyrannical government regulation are easy enough to
conjure.
And
science can be tricky to explain and to defend, especially in the
shouting-heads cable news format. The scientists Mr. Kenner interviews —
notably James E. Hansen,
formerly of NASA, who was among the first to establish a link between
carbon emissions and climate change — tend to be earnest and serious.
The scientific method is also predicated on intellectual humility, on
falsifiable hypotheses and endless revisions in the face of new data.
Public relations, in contrast, is built on slickness, grandiosity and
charm. These traits are exemplified by Marc Morano, a cheerful and
unapologetic promoter of climate-change skepticism and currently the
executive director of the website Climate Depot.
One
of the film’s conceits is that the actions of Mr. Morano and his
colleagues can be con games and magic tricks. A professional magician,
Jamy Ian Swiss, is on hand to fool an audience with a deck of cards and
to draw a distinction between his own “honest lies” and the shady doings
of corporate shills and spinners. But his presence, and the animated
playing cards that sometimes fly across the screen, feel like a glib and
somewhat condescending gimmick, an attempt to wring some fun out of a
grim and appalling story.
More than that, the analogy between climate-change denial and classic
confidence schemes doesn’t really hold up. Since the ’80s and ’90s, when
the tobacco industry was trying to slow down regulation and lawsuits,
the political landscape has changed, and so have the techniques of the
anti-science side. Some of the attorneys general who forced the 1998
settlement were Republicans, after all. By contrast, in 2010 Bob Inglis,
a conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina, was defeated
in the primary after publicly acknowledging the reality of climate
change.
Climate-change
denial has been raised to an ideological principle, a tenet of modern
conservative and libertarian politics. Deceit and secrecy are hardly
necessary when large portions of the public eagerly accept the message.
If anti-environmentalist politics resemble a game of three-card monte,
it’s one in which all the cards are face up and the marks place their
bets on a nonexistent ace. Anyone who points out the error can be
accused of liberal bias, and credulous journalists will give equal
weight to both sides of the “debate.”
“Merchants of Doubt” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Obscene displays of greed and dishonesty.
Merchants of Doubt
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Director
Robert Kenner
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Writers
Erik M. Conway, Robert Kenner, Naomi Oreskes, Kim Roberts
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Stars
Frederick Singer, Naomi Oreskes, Jamy Ian Swiss, Sam Roe
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Rating
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Running Time
1h 36m
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Genre
Documentary
