Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in
the mind of the general public.
—Unnamed tobacco executive, Brown & Williamson (1969)
In the 1990s, as the scientific evidence for human-caused global warming grew stronger and calls for
action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions grew louder, fossil fuel industry executives made a critical
decision. Rather than concede the potential threat climate change posed and the necessity of ultimately
reducing fossil fuel use, they would instead engage in a massive, media-savvy public relations
campaign. The strategy was simple: While presenting a seemingly forward-thinking, pro-
environmental public face, oil companies and allied economic and political interests would, behind
the scenes, use various means to sow doubt about the validity of the underlying science on climate
change. It was a finely tuned balancing act intended to forestall any governmental policy action to
regulate greenhouse gas emissions while seeking to maintain a positive corporate image.
Doubt Is Their Product
describes the corporate public relations campaigns that the tobacco and other industries used for
decades to discredit research demonstrating adverse health impacts of their products—a campaign
that was successfully satirized in the 2005 movie
Thank You for Smoking
. The striking similarity with
the tactics of climate change denial did not go unnoticed by former
Science
magazine editor-in-chief
Donald Kennedy, who commented on the topic's jacket, “if you're worried about climate change,
keep worrying, because the same program is underway there.”
In
The Republican War on Science,
Chris Mooney argues that the corporate-funded public
relations campaigns of recent decades aimed at discrediting the science behind policies designed to
protect our environment and health arose from conservative distaste of governmental regulation.
2
Those campaigns came to a head, he suggests, in the extreme antiregulatory atmosphere of the George
W. Bush administration of 2000-2008. Legislation such as the Data Quality Act of 2001 saddled
government agencies with onerous requirements on how they must respond to demands and
complaints from industry groups regarding any data or scientific studies used in establishing
government policy. It was, in Mooney's words, “a science abuser's dream come true,” and it signaled
the increasing politicization of science at the very time the hockey stick was coming to prominence.
Industry groups sought to frame the public discourse by constructing, to use the characterization
