Quotes from Naomi Oreskes

The results showed a fivefold increase in breast cancer risk among women with high levels of serum DDT or its metabolites.59 DDT does cause cancer, it does affect human health, and it does cost human lives. Rachel Carson was not wrong.

But the construction of a revisionist history of DDT gives the game away, because it came so long after the science was settled, far too long to argue that scientists had not come to agreement, that there was still a real scientific debate. The game here, as before, was to defend an extreme free market ideology. But in this case, they didn't just deny the facts of science. They denied the facts of history.

We took modest steps, and then did nothing to strengthen them as time went on, even as the science increasingly indicated that we needed to. We went on faith that the market would do its "magic.

And this brings us to the crux of our story, the pivot around which these diverse actors came together. The link that unites the tobacco industry, conservative think tanks, and the scientists in our story is the defense of the free market.

Fred Singer gave his game away when he denied the reality of the ozone hole, suggesting that people involved in the issue "probably [have] … hidden agendas of their own—not just to 'save the environment' but to change our economic system … Some of these 'coercive utopians' are socialists, some are technology-hating Luddites; most have a great desire to regulate—on as large a scale as possible."33

As an independent source of authority and knowledge, science has always had the capacity to challenge ruling powers' ability to control people by controlling their beliefs. Indeed, it has the power to challenge anyone who wishes to preserve, protect, or defend the status quo.

The billionaire investor George Soros has coined a term to describe this perspective: "free market fundamentalism." It is the belief not simply that free markets are the best way to run an economic system, but that free markets are the only way that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms. "The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest,"36 Soros wrote.

Free market fundamentalists can perhaps hold to their views because often they have very little direct experience in commerce or industry. The men in our story all made their careers in programs and institutions that were either directly created by the federal government or largely funded by it.

Those "irresponsible" environmentalists had been right: the emissions had not come down in harmless traces, but as acid rain. This could have been avoided had the power companies done the right thing and controlled pollution at the source, rather than attempting to get around air quality standards by building taller smokestacks and attacking environmentalists.

The dichotomy of man versus environment, or jobs versus environment, or prosperity versus environment, is a dangerous fiction constructed to justify greed. It cynically warrants destruction in the name of the false prophet of progress. That is what I believe.

Balance was interpreted, it seems, as giving equal weight to both sides, rather than giving accurate weight to both sides.

Nierenberg was a man of strong will and even stronger opinions—a good talker but not always a good listener. Some colleagues said that the old adage about famous physicists definitely applied to him: he was sometimes in error but never in doubt. And he was fiercely competitive, often debating until his adversaries simply gave up.

A 1994 FOREST report entitled "Through the Smokescreen of Science: The Dangers of Politically Corrupted Science for Democratic Public Policy" claimed much the same thing as Fred Singer had: that science was being rigged to advance a political agenda. Whether or not that was true, this report made clear that the inverse was certainly true: science was being attacked to advance their agenda, the defense of free market capitalism.

Nicholas Stern, formerly chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank from 2000 to 2003, and principal author of the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change (commissioned by U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown), has called climate change "the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen."55 No wonder the defenders of free market capitalism are worried.

facsimile science. (By this term I mean materials that carry the accoutrements of science—including in some cases peer review—but fail to adhere to accepted scientific standards such as methodological naturalism, complete and open reporting of data, and the willingness to revise assumptions in the light of data.)49 This is the problem of for-profit and predatory conferences and journals.

Scientists had been saying for a long time that human activity was a likely cause of warming. They were now saying that it was demonstrated.

The committee was divided, but it was divided 8–1, with the dissenter appointed by the Reagan White House.

The writer C. S. Lewis once characterized this style of argument: "The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden."18 Such arguments are effectively impossible to refute, as Lewis noted. "A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved," although it does "tell us a good deal about those who hold it."19 The

An all-purpose expert is an oxymoron.

When posed to journalists, however, the loaded questions did the trick: they convinced people who didn't know otherwise that there was still a lot of doubt about the whole matter. The industry had realized that you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions, even if you actually knew the answers and they didn't help your case.

Many years later, the right wing continued to lambast Sagan well after the man was dead, while Seitz's attack on nuclear winter was reprised by Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s and by novelist Michael Crichton in the 2000s.110 What was going on? The answer is that the right-wing turn against science had begun.

The press would indeed take the "conservative" position. A New York Times reporter put it this way: "The Academy found that since there is no politically or economically realistic way of heading off the greenhouse effect, strategies must be prepared to adapt to a 'high temperature world.'"50 But the Academy hadn't found that; the committee had asserted it. And it wasn't the Academy; it was Bill Nierenberg and a handful of economists.

key attribute of the period was that power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong

their scientific colleagues were increasingly finding evidence that capitalism was failing in a crucial respect: it was failing to protect the natural environment upon which all life—free or not—ultimately depends.