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| Richard Baker/Getty Images |
Stanford,
Calif. — THE good news got pretty much drowned out this month: Yes,
2016 is on track to become the hottest year on record, but thankfully
also the third year in a row to see relatively flat growth in global
greenhouse gas emissions. With global economic growth on the order of 3
percent a year, we may well have turned a corner toward a sustainable
climate economy.
The
bad news, of course, is that the world’s wealthiest nation, home to
many of the scholars scrambling to reverse global warming, has elected a
new president with little or no interest in the topic. Or an active
disinterest. Donald J. Trump is surrounding himself with advisers who
are likely to do little to challenge his notion of climate change as a
Chinese hoax. People like to think of us as living in an age of
information, but a better descriptor might be “the age of ignorance.”
How did we get into this predicament? Why are we about to inaugurate the most anti-science administration in American history?
As
a graduate student at Harvard in the 1970s and early 1980s, I was
astonished to find how little concern there was for the beliefs of
ordinary Americans. I was in the history of science department, where
all the talk was of Einstein and Darwin and Newton, with the occasional
glance at the “reception” of such ideas in the larger literate populace.
I
had grown up in a small town in Texas, and later in Kansas City, where
the people I knew often talked about nature and God’s glory and
corruption and the good life. At Harvard, though, I was puzzled that my
professors seemed to have little interest in people outside the
vanguard, the kinds of people I had come from, many of whom were
fundamentalist Christians, people of solid faith but often in desperate
conditions. Why was there so little interest in what they thought or
believed? That’s Point 1.
Point
2: Early in my career as a historian, I was further bothered by how
little attention was given to science as an instrument of popular
deception. We like to think of science as the opposite of ignorance, the
light that washes away the darkness, but there’s much more to that
story.
Here
my Harvard years were more illuminating. I got into a crowd of
appropriately radicalized students, and started to better understand the
place of science in the arc of human history. I learned about how
science has not always been the saving grace we like to imagine; science
gives rise as easily to nuclear bombs and bioweapons as to penicillin
and the iPad. I taught for several years in the biology department,
where I learned that cigarette makers had been giving millions of
dollars to Harvard and other elite institutions to curry favor.
I
also started understanding how science could be used as an instrument
of deception — and to create or perpetuate ignorance. That is important,
because while scholars were ignoring what Karl Marx dismissively called
“the idiocy of rural life” (Point 1), tobacco and soft drink and oil
companies facing taxation and regulation were busily disseminating
mythologies about their products, to keep potential regulators at bay
(Point 2).
The
denialist conspiracy of the cigarette industry was crucial in this
context, since science was one of the instruments used by Big Tobacco to
carry out its denial (and distraction) campaign. Cigarette makers had
met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City on Dec. 14, 1953, to plan a
strategy to rebut the evidence that cigarettes were causing cancer and
other maladies. The strategy was pure genius: The claim would be that it
had not been “proved” that cigarettes really cause disease, so there
was room for honest doubt. Cigarette makers promised to finance research
to get to the truth, while privately acknowledging (in a notorious
Brown & Williamson document from 1969) that “Doubt is our product.”
For
decades thereafter, cigarette makers poured hundreds of millions of
dollars into basic biomedical research, exploring things like genetic
and viral or occupational causes of cancer — anything but tobacco.
Research financed by the industry led to over 7,000 publications in
peer-reviewed medical literature and 10 Nobel Prizes. Including
consulting relationships, my research shows that at least 25 Nobel
laureates have taken money from the cigarette industry over the past
half-century. (Full disclosure: I’ve testified against that industry in
dozens of tobacco trials.)
Now
we know that many other industries have learned from Big Tobacco’s
playbook. Physicians hired by the National Football League have
questioned the evidence that concussions can cause brain disease, and
soda sellers have financed research to deny that sugar causes obesity.
And climate deniers have conducted a kind of scavenger hunt for oddities
that appear to challenge the overwhelming consensus of climate
scientists.
This
latter fact might be little more than a historical quirk, were it not
for the fact that we’ll soon have a president whose understanding of
science is more like that of the people in the towns where I grew up
than those scholars who taught me about Darwin and Einstein at Harvard.
We
now live in a world where ignorance of a very dangerous sort is being
deliberately manufactured, to protect certain kinds of unfettered
corporate enterprise. The global climate catastrophe gets short shrift,
largely because powerful fossil fuel producers still have enormous
political clout, following decades-long campaigns to sow doubt about
whether anthropogenic emissions are really causing planetary warming.
Trust in science suffers, but also trust in government. And that is not
an accident. Climate deniers are not so much anti-science as
anti-regulation and anti-government.
Jeff Nesbit, in his recent book, “Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the G.O.P.,”
documents how Big Tobacco joined with Big Oil in the early 1990s to
create anti-tax front groups. These AstroTurf organizations waged a
concerted effort to defend the unencumbered sale of cigarettes and
petro-products. The breathtaking idea was to protect tobacco and oil
from regulation and taxes by starting a movement that would combat all regulation and all taxes.
Part
of the strategy, according to Mr. Nesbit, who worked for a group
involved in the effort and witnessed firsthand the beginning of this
devil’s dance, was to sow doubt by corrupting expertise, while
simultaneously capturing the high ground of open-mindedness and even
caution itself, with the deceptive mantra: “We need more research.” Much
of the climate denial now embraced by people like Mr. Trump was first
expressed in the disinformation campaigns of Big Oil — campaigns modeled
closely on Big Tobacco’s strategies.
We
sometimes hear that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it,
but a “repeat” is perhaps now the least of our worries. Judging purely
from his transition team, Mr. Trump’s administration could be more
hostile to modern science — and especially earth and environmental
sciences — than any we have ever had. Whole agencies could go on the
chopping block or face deliberate evisceration. President Obama’s Clean
Power Plan may be in jeopardy, along with funding for the Environmental
Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. Grumblings can even be heard from Europe that if the
Paris climate accord is abandoned, the United States may face carbon
taxes on its export goods. Ignorance and its diabolic facilitator — the
corruption of expertise — both have real-world costs that we ignore at
our peril.
*Robert N. Proctor
is a professor of the history of science at Stanford and the author of
“Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for
Abolition.”
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