David Biello asks the question - What is the difference between a magician and a man who obscures the truth about global warming for the fossil-fuel industry? Magicians are moral liars, according to the illuminating new documentary Merchants of Doubt, by director Robert Kenner. That is because their magic acts use expertise in the art of deception and misdirection to entertain. Shills for the fossil fuel-industry, such as Steve Milloy, Marc Morano and others examined and accused in this film, use their expertise to fool people about matters of life and death. The new documentary springs from the 2010 eponymous book by historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.
The film (and the book before it) lays out how the fossil-fuel industry funds talking heads to sow confusion about climate change in a deliberate imitation of the successful doubt-sowing tactics of the tobacco industry. That industry famously employed experts in public relations, starting with venerable PR firm Hill and Knowlton, to cast doubt on the idea that smoking causes lung cancer or that nicotine was addictive, tactics that delayed regulation of the tobacco industry for decades. Sowing these doubts ensured at least 50 years worth of profits on tobacco and condemned millions of smokers to a premature death in the U.S.
The success of that effort has led a host of industries with environmental or health problems with asbestos, chemicals, coal and pharmaceuticals, among others to adopt this playbook to protect their profits and cost hundreds of thousands of lives from cancers and other diseases related to smoking. There may be no bigger PR problem than climate change. The fossil-fuel industry perceives it as a war on coal and oil. So step one in the successful tobacco playbook is to suggest that more data is needed to confirm any link between the carbon dioxide spewed from fossil-fuel burning and global warming....
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