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Benjamin Santer
William Nierenberg was a successful oceanographer and nuclear physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb during World War II and later founded the George C. Marshall Institute with his friends and colleagues Fred Seitz and Robert Jastrow. Nierenberg also led important panels on acid rain and climate change for the U.S. government. Based on their research, Oreskes and Conway conclude that Nierenberg likely edited the executive summary of the acid rain panel’s report in order to make it less supportive of government regulation and therefore more favorable to polluting industry. Similarly, the report he organized on global warming emphasized economists’ doubts about the cost of taking regulatory action, while minimizing climate scientists’ serious concerns about the effects of global warming. A few years later, he retired and began popularizing absurd, contrarian hypotheses about climate change on behalf of the Marshall Institute. But thanks largely to Nierenberg’s political connections, the government took the Marshall Institute’s distorted statistics and baseless assertions more seriously than the broad consensus of peer reviewed scientific research when setting policy. Ultimately, like the other “merchants of doubt,” he became a pariah win the scientific community because of his dishonest tactics.
William Nierenberg Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by William Nierenberg or refer to William Nierenberg. 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:
).
Chapter 3
Quotes
Whether or not the House Committee chairman believed Singer’s claims, his letter certainly would have had at least one effect: to make it appear that the committee was divided and there was real and serious scientific disagreement. The committee was divided, but it was divided 8–1, with the dissenter appointed by the Reagan White House.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5
Quotes
Anti-Communism had launched the weapons and rocketry programs that launched the careers of Singer, Seitz, and Nierenberg, and anti-Communism had underlain their politics since the days of Sputnik. Their defense of freedom was a defense against Soviet Communism. But somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
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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William Nierenberg Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by William Nierenberg or refer to William Nierenberg. 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:
).
Chapter 3
Quotes
Whether or not the House Committee chairman believed Singer’s claims, his letter certainly would have had at least one effect: to make it appear that the committee was divided and there was real and serious scientific disagreement. The committee was divided, but it was divided 8–1, with the dissenter appointed by the Reagan White House.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5
Quotes
Anti-Communism had launched the weapons and rocketry programs that launched the careers of Singer, Seitz, and Nierenberg, and anti-Communism had underlain their politics since the days of Sputnik. Their defense of freedom was a defense against Soviet Communism. But somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
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?
