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James E. Hansen
Robert Jastrow was a prominent NASA physicist who became a prominent “merchant of doubt” after retirement. A strong believer in free market capitalism, U.S. global power, and nuclear proliferation, he founded the George C. Marshall Institute along with Fred Seitz and William Nierenberg to promote his views and defend Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative plan. He published articles warning the public about an imaginary high-tech Soviet missile defense system and baselessly accused scientists like Carl Sagan of working for the enemy. He later helped steer the Marshall Institute toward climate change denialism.
Robert Jastrow Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Robert Jastrow or refer to Robert Jastrow. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Conclusion
Quotes
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. Robert Jastrow spent the lion’s share of his career at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies—part of NASA. Frederick Seitz and Bill Nierenberg launched their careers in the atomic weapons programs, and expanded them at universities whose research activities were almost entirely funded by the federal government at taxpayer expense. Fred Singer worked directly for the government, first at the National Weather Satellite Service, later in the Department of Transportation. If government is bad and free markets are good, why did they not reject government support for their own research and professional positions and work in the private sector?
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Robert Jastrow Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Robert Jastrow or refer to Robert Jastrow. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Conclusion
Quotes
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. Robert Jastrow spent the lion’s share of his career at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies—part of NASA. Frederick Seitz and Bill Nierenberg launched their careers in the atomic weapons programs, and expanded them at universities whose research activities were almost entirely funded by the federal government at taxpayer expense. Fred Singer worked directly for the government, first at the National Weather Satellite Service, later in the Department of Transportation. If government is bad and free markets are good, why did they not reject government support for their own research and professional positions and work in the private sector?
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