Courtesy of Sony Picture Classics
3.5/4 Stars
Rated PG-13
Directed by Robert Kenne
Back in the 1960s and ’70s, the tobacco industry bought time to retool itself—and to sell more of its core product to the domestic market—with a concerted campaign of false science. The industry funded institutes whose findings sought to shed doubt on or at least minimize the evidence linking smoking to cancer and heart disease. They also launched an ad campaign casting cigarettes in libertarian language: Big Government, keep your hands off my smokes, says Big Tobacco through the guise of actors pretending to be ordinary citizens.
A new documentary, Merchants of Doubt, surveys the history of fraudulent corporate science, starting with tobacco and touching on other issues, such as legally mandated “fire-retardant” fabric laced with toxins and ineffective against flames, but promoted by chemical firms under the smiling guise of protecting children from hazard.
The main topic, however, is the central issue facing our future: global climate change. Virtually all climate scientists agree that the world is getting warmer from the accelerated burning of fossil fuel and that the results will be catastrophic without changes in technology or consumption. And yet, alone among ostensibly “developed” nations, the majority of Americans don’t believe in climate change. Merchants of Doubt investigates how and why this could be.
With Big Tobacco’s success as its model, the petroleum and coal industries (Big Fossil?) have recruited a thin network of real scientists as climate change deniers (albeit none of them actually work in climate science). The motives of the deniers are mixed. Some are paid stooges, others buy into an ideology that sees environmentalism as the stalking horse for that old evil, Communism. First step: regulate gas mileage. Next step: red flags over the White House. The doubtful science of the deniers is buttressed by “think tanks” that do little thinking but lots of propagandizing; by attack dog talking heads and the blubbering idiots of Fox News; and mainstream journalism’s insistence on “giving both sides,” regardless of how dangerous one side might be.
The machinations of the tobacco industry were finally thwarted when whistle blowers released documents showing exactly what the CEOs had been up to for decades. Perhaps a Wikileaker will get the goods on David Koch and friends, but even if that occurs, millions of Americans whose neuro-systems have been warped by exposure to the toxin of Bill O’Reilly will hold out, regardless of evidence. Denying climate change has become the shibboleth of an angry subculture.
