Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (39 page)

Steve Milloy, associated with the Cato Institute and the AEI, became executive director of TASSC in 1997
⁸⁶
and, though TASSC ceased operations in the late 1990s, Milloy continues to run a renamed Advancement of Sound Science Center (ASSC) and the website JunkScience.com, also funded by Philip Morris through the PR firm APCO.
⁸⁷
These associated sound science front groups define junk science as “faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas.”
⁸⁸
Here they are referring to mainstream academic science and attributing their own hidden agendas to their target, another example of reverse rhetoric. Though initiated by Philip Morris in its attempt to position tobacco among less life-threatening products, TASCC and its offspring went on to champion the denial of global warming.

Claims to sound science are ubiquitous on think tank websites. The ACSH says of itself that it “was founded in 1978 by a group of scientists who had become concerned that many important public policies related to health and the environment did not have a sound scientific basis. These scientists created the organization to add reason and balance to debates about public health issues and bring common sense views to the public.”
⁸⁹
The Marshall Institute also claimed the label, stating its mission was “to encourage the use of sound science in public policy,”
⁹⁰
though that particular formulation has been dropped from the website, which now simply claims that the institute promotes “accurate and impartial technical assessments.”
⁹¹
Fred Singer, in almost the same words as TASSC, claimed that SEPP is “a non-partisan, nor-for-profit, privately funded research organization, devoted to the use of sound science in public policy.”
⁹²

The Democratic congressman George Brown, in his 1996 report to the Democratic caucus of the Science Committee, unmasked the sound science mantra for what it was—an attempt to redefine science as absolutely certainty and thus create an apparent lack in the knowledge, a gap where doubt could multiply and almost all the findings of the environmental and health sciences could be delegitimized.
⁹³
In their survey of the use of the term “junk science” in the US popular press, environmental consultant Charles Herrick and environmental philosopher Dale Jamieson found that it appeared in connection with a vast range of environmental issues, from global warming, sea-level rise, and species loss to risks from pesticides, dioxins, air pollution, and endocrine disruptors. They identified what they called the junk science “trope”: “a punchy, dazzling, but highly misleading” rhetorical device designed to enlist emotional responses. The vast majority (84 percent) of the articles they examined for the years 1995–2000 ran an antiregulatory message, contending that the policy or regulation at issue was based on junk science.
⁹⁴
This correlation reflects the close relationship between the term
junk science
and antiregulation advocates.

Claims to speak for sound science were accompanied by attacks on professional scientists and their work. In 1986, for example, Frederick Seitz’s cousin, Russell Seitz, another physicist affiliated with conservative strategic policy institutes, attacked the concept of “nuclear winter,” calling the modeling involved a “series of coin tosses.” He went on to claim that scientists are guided by such “non-rational factors as rhetoric, propaganda, and personal prejudice” and asserted that “politically motivated” scientists had come to dominate “matters of science and public policy.”
⁹⁵
The climatologist Ben Santer was attacked for “scientific cleansing” and “secretly altering” the 1995 IPCC report when he was merely carrying out routine amendments according to IPCC protocols. His attackers, including Fred Seitz and Nierenberg, accused him of fraud and conspiracy using the
Wall Street Journal
, which declined to publish his rebuttals in full.
⁹⁶
On the one hand, “contrarians” wrapped themselves in the sound science mantle and sidestepped the peer review regime by publishing their work through think tank channels and right-wing newspapers rather than in the usual scholarly journals; on the other, they targeted the scientific mainstream as leftist and unreliable. In this way they aimed to undermine the credibility of mainstream natural scientists in academic settings.
⁹⁷

In their survey of documents on global warming circulated by the major think tanks from 1992 to 1997, McCright and Dunlap found that 71 percent attempted to discredit the evidentiary basis of the consensus science. These think tank documents claimed that climate models were biased, alleging that the IPCC’s consensus was “manufactured” or “doctored” and its peer review process “corrupted” and “thoroughly politicized.” A significant minority of the documents (18 percent) engaged in simple abuse of the kind leveled at
The Limits to Growth
in the early 1970s, calling scientists “modern-day apocalyptics,” part of “the doomsday crowd,” “prophets of doom,” and purveyors of “myth” or “scare tactics.” Many of the documents (13.4 percent) labeled the work of the scientific mainstream as “tabloid science” and “junk science,” a feat of cross attribution in which amateurs and nonscientists labeled as junk the work of the professionals.
⁹⁸

More Reverse Rhetoric

This kind of blatant projection is mirrored in other cases of reverse attribution. An even more astonishing swap has been the recasting of public interest groups as “special interest groups.” This tactic shifts the accusation away from the actual vested interests and onto the community groups and citizen activists, who, with little to no economic interest, are struggling to curb their excesses.

The world government scare, touched on by Luntz in his memo on how to incite emotion in the service of environmental delay, carries a similar irony. While the business-friendly Right condemns the alleged theft of American sovereignty by the UN and its processes of negotiation, the now-entrenched coercive apparatus of the free market
actually
obstructs democratic governments from deciding about many matters affecting their citizens and environment. The international financial system threatens capital flight if governments fail to supply the requisite business-friendly measures, and the WTO rules explored in chapter 13 preclude many kinds of health, safety, and environmental protection measures. The South Korean prime minister who was responsible for implementing neoliberal policies in the 1990s remarked that “we did not realise that the victory of the Cold War was a victory for market forces above politics.”
⁹⁹

Similarly, opponents of the business takeover of political life are popularly branded as “elites,” “latte lovers” and “Chardonnay sippers”—effete, arrogant enemies of the “common man.” In this trope, the actual ruling elites who shaped the world in the past forty years are made to disappear—or, where visible, to masquerade as the humble servants of all.

Attack Stance of the Free Marketeers

As previously discussed, the overall neoliberal movement owed its emergence to an alliance between the free market intelligentsia and sectors of capital with profits threatened by regulation or taxation. Similarly, the pioneers of the scientific denial machinery were the right-wing think tanks allied with industries anxious to avoid regulation and a widening group of politicians and policymakers who were influenced or paid outright. The mushrooming of conservative think tanks did indeed provide an “artillery,” as Ralph Harris of London’s IEA put it, capable of softening up any opposition. First in the United States, then gradually across the rest of the world, the think tank system took on environmentalism as a central target in its war to protect corporate dominance and profits.

Global warming is at the center of the campaign of doubt and delay because fossil fuels have been intrinsic to the very fabric of industrial growth and prosperity. As outlined in chapter 2, the exploitation of oil and the expansion of its use through the twentieth century was “something new under the sun”
¹⁰⁰
and vital to the unprecedented growth of that century. So central is the role of petroleum that, as production of conventional liquid oil reached a plateau in the first decade of the twenty-first century, oil corporations scrambled to expand options such as tar sands and shale oil, with scant regard for the higher greenhouse gas emissions per gallon of liquid oil. Similarly, the use of coal, wound back in the middle of the twentieth century, rebounded after the oil shocks of the 1970s. While repeated warnings from climate scientists that emissions need to start trending downward by 2020 and that around 80 percent of known reserves of fossil fuels need to remain in the ground if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change, the US Energy Information Administration’s 2013
International Energy Outlook
predicts ongoing reliance on fossil fuels, especially coal, and a 46 percent increase in energy-related carbon dioxide emissions by 2040.
¹⁰¹
If this actually occurs, as the growth economy requires, runaway global warming is very probably inevitable.

Some industry representatives, PR professionals, and operators of think tanks and front groups acknowledged an explicit aim to destroy environmentalism altogether. Bob Williams, an oil industry journalist, wrote in 1991:

What is the goal the petroleum industry should strive for in the Decade of the Environment? To put the environmental lobby out of business.… There is no greater imperative.… If the petroleum industry is to survive, it must render the environmental lobby superfluous, an anachronism.
¹⁰²

Ron Arnold, one of the initiators of the “wise use” umbrella organization and vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE) since 1984, is recorded in interviews with numerous journalists declaring war on environmentalism. For example:

Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement.… We’re dead serious—we’re going to destroy them.
¹⁰³

People in industry, I’m going to do my best for you. Environmentalists, I’m coming to get you.… We’re out to kill the fuckers. We’re simply trying to eliminate them. Our goal is to destroy environmentalism once and for all.
¹⁰⁴

Arnold saw himself and the CDFE as the forward assault team in this war against environmentalists: “We [CDFE] created a sector of public opinion that didn’t used to exist. No one was aware that environmentalism was a problem until we came along.”
¹⁰⁵
In his interview for
Outside
magazine, Arnold revealed an appreciation of Bernays’s technique—he had exploited people’s “fear, hate and revenge,” he told John Krakauer. “Wise use” itself was “a marvellously ambiguous expression.… Symbols register most powerfully in the subconscious when they’re not perfectly clear.… Facts don’t really matter. In politics, perception is reality.”
¹⁰⁶
“Wise use” was perfect. It smacked of good judgment and responsibility and could have meant almost anything.

Arnold cited two core conservative objections to environmentalism: It would “drastically reduce or dismantle industrial civilization” and it would “impose a coercive form of government on America.”
¹⁰⁷
Fred Singer harbored the same twin fears, and explicitly named the second as the fear of socialism. In his paper about the alleged ozone exaggerations, he wrote:

And then there are probably those with [a] hidden agenda—not just to “save the environment” but to change our economic system. The telltale signs are the attack on free enterprise, the corporation, the profit motive, the new technologies. Some are socialists, some are Luddites.… To them global regulation is the “holy grail.”
¹⁰⁸

Whatever the danger of the regulatory holy grail supposedly sought by rabid environmentalists, Frank Mankiewicz, senior executive at the prominent PR firm Hill and Knowlton, was nearer the mark. He did not envisage any real threat:

The big corporations … are scared shitless of the environmental movement. They sense that there’s a majority out there and that the emotions are all on the other side.… They think the politicians are going to yield to the emotions. I think the corporations are wrong about that. I think the companies will have to give in only at insignificant levels. Because the companies are too strong, they’re the establishment. The environmentalists are going to have to be like the mob in the square in Romania before they prevail.
¹⁰⁹

Balance as Bias: The Role of the Press

The idea of balance, canvassed by Powell in his memo, has been deployed as a vital tool in the tactics of the think tanks throughout these crucial decades. The Marshall Institute used it from the outset, arguing that journalists were obligated to present “both sides” of the Star Wars controversy, effectively giving a tiny minority position equal weight to that of the large majority of the scientific community.

In matters of opinion, the notion of balance in media reporting is often appropriate, since conflicting views warrant adequate space in a democratic system. But, in matters of fact, there is little or no role for “balance.” What is required is accuracy. Indeed, as
New York Times
public editor Daniel Okrent remarked, “The pursuit of balance can create imbalance” when something is obviously true.
¹¹⁰
In matters of science, as with any discipline pursuing evidence-based facts, “equal time” is only apposite to the extent that the scientific community is somewhat evenly split and consensus is unstable. In the case of global warming, the degree of agreement on human-induced climate change is almost total and has been for a decade or more;
¹¹¹
it has been endorsed by all the premier institutions of science, even in the United States. As the physicist James D. Baker commented, “There is a better scientific consensus on this than on any other issue I know—except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics.”
¹¹²
In such a situation, the maintenance of an even balance is misrepresentation.