Merchants of Doubt Summary

In Merchants of Doubt, the historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway show how a small group of Cold War physicists have repeatedly undermined the push for environmental policy in the U.S. since the 1970s. Funded primarily by corporations in the tobacco, fossil fuel, and chemical industries, these physicists—most importantly Fred Singer and Fred Seitz—have argued that smoking doesn’t cause cancer, the climate isn’t changing, and deadly pesticides like DDT do more good than harm. While the scientific community has long reached a consensus about these issues, the “merchants of doubt”—retired lobbyists who have done no original research of their own—continue to convince much of the public and government that these dangers don’t exist at all.

The authors introduce their book by recounting how Fred Seitz and Fred Singer accused the leading atmospheric scientist Ben Santer of doctoring a prominent 1995 report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. All that Santer did was edit the report in response to peer review comments—exactly like scientists are supposed to. But this didn’t matter: Seitz and Singer were media savvy and politically connected enough to ruin Santer’s reputation and make the public question his research.

In the first chapter, Oreskes and Conway explain Fred Seitz got his start in the tobacco industry. In the 1950s, cigarette companies started fighting new research on the dangers of smoking by hiring scientists to publicly testify that cigarettes were safe. For two decades, the industry bombarded doctors, journalists, and politicians with misleading pamphlets and insisted that the media cover “both sides” of the research. In 1979, as part of this effort, the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company hired Seitz to manage a new biomedical research program. The program would fund research that explored other causes of lung cancer, besides cigarettes. Seitz was already a well-known physicist: he helped develop the atomic bomb and even served as president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He was also a firm anti-communist who believed that private industry, not the government, should fund science.

In the next chapter, Oreskes and Conway explain how Seitz took the lessons he learned in the tobacco industry to the George C. Marshall Institute, a think tank that physicists Edward Teller and Robert Jastrow created to promote nuclear weapons proliferation and President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) anti-missile system. Most astronomers agreed that the SDI would be ineffective, while a nuclear war would destroy most life on Earth. In response, the Marshall Institute publicly insisted that the Soviet Union had a superior missile defense system (it didn’t) and was planning to launch a world war (it wasn’t). It accused leading astronomer Carl Sagan of working for the USSR and called the NAS a corrupt, communist conspiracy group. Oreskes and Conway argue that, with the formation of the Marshall Institute, “the right-wing turn against science had begun.”

The next chapter is about acid rain. In the 1970s, meteorologists like Bert Bolin and Gene Likens discovered that industrial pollution was causing acid rain, which was destroying forests and devastating fish populations. But in the 1980s, the Reagan administration was reluctant to place regulations on polluting companies. After a joint U.S.-Canada study concluded that acid rain was a serious problem, Reagan created an independent nine-member panel to review the study and put the Cold War physicist William Nierenberg in charge. All the scientists on the panel agreed that the study was correct—except the satellite physicist Fred Singer, who accused the others of exaggeration and repeated unscientific claims from the energy industry. After the panel finished its interim report, the White House let Singer add a new introduction, in which he argued that fixing acid rain would be too expensive. Later, Nierenberg rewrote the final report’s executive summary to the same effect, without the other scientists’ knowledge. Based on this report, the Reagan administration declared that the research on acid rain was unsettled and decided not to regulate the emissions that cause it.

In Chapter 4, Oreskes and Conway describe how Fred Singer worked with aerosol companies to spread doubt about the growing ozone hole that scientists discovered in the 1980s. After researchers showed proved that chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were destroying atmospheric ozone, Singer began publicly stating that climate change would fix the ozone hole and that CFC substitutes would be toxic (even though they hadn’t been invented yet). After the UN agreed to ban CFCs, Singer continued attacking the scientific consensus. He never got the CFC ban overturned, but his personal think tank did make millions of dollars. He also influenced other contrarians like the zoologist and governor Dixy Lee Ray, who cited his writings to argue that environmentalists were trying to destroy capitalism.

In Chapter 5, Oreskes and Conway follow Singer to his work on secondhand smoke. In 1981, researchers found that even being around smokers could cause cancer, and in 1986, the Surgeon General released a public report confirming these findings. As the government acted to ban smoking in public places and offices, the tobacco industry started spending millions of dollars “to maintain the controversy.” It hired Fred Seitz and Fred Singer, called studies it didn’t like “junk science,” and baselessly accused the EPA of distorting evidence. Of course, the EPA’s conclusions were based on aggregating dozens of peer-reviewed studies, while the tobacco industry had no valid evidence of its own. Eventually, it just started claiming that laws against smoking would destroy people’s liberty.

In Chapter 6, Oreskes and Conway explain how the merchants of doubt began working on climate change. After research in the 1960s and 1970s found that CO2 emissions could dramatically warm Earth, the White House asked leading scholars to review the evidence. Earth scientists found that climate change could be catastrophic, but economists like Thomas Schelling argued that global warming would be too expensive to stop. In a crucial seven-chapter NAS report compiled by William Nierenberg, five chapters by scientists who emphasized the grave dangers of climate change were wedged between an introduction and conclusion by economists who promoted a “wait and see” approach. Ultimately, the economists got the upper hand: the report’s executive summary echoed their talking points. Even though scientists viewed the final report as “garbage,” it still became the foundation for the U.S. government’s climate policy. After retirement, William Nierenberg joined the George C. Marshall Institute. Along with Robert Jastrow and Fred Seitz, he started pushing the idea that the sun was causing global warming all on its own. Their work was full of serious distortions and not peer reviewed, but the White House listened to them.

Later, Fred Singer published a paper in collaboration with Roger Revelle, the scientist who first discovered that CO2 emissions could cause climate change. But Revelle suffered a near-fatal heart attack, and Singer wrote the paper all on his own. When Revelle objected to Singer’s claim that global warming would probably be insignificant, Singer published the paper anyway—and kept Revelle’s name on it. Reveille died shortly after. Singer started claiming that Revelle had changed his mind and stopped believing in climate change. In fact, he has made this claim for decades, and he has even sued Justin Lancaster, Revelle’s former graduate student, who tried to correct the record. Finally, Singer and Seitz went after Ben Santer, the climate modeler whose case Oreskes and Conway described in their introduction. The Wall Street Journal published Seitz and Singer’s attacks on Santer in full, but the paper heavily edited Santer’s replies to make them appear unreasonable.

In Chapter 7, Oreskes and Conway explain how the merchants of doubt attacked the famed biologist and science writer Rachel Carson years after her death. Carson had discovered that the widely used pesticide DDT was extremely toxic to wildlife and published her findings in the 1962 book Silent Spring. Her work convinced the government to ban DDT. But in the early 2000s, contrarians like Dixy Lee Ray and Steven Milloy started accusing Carson of mass murder, based on the flawed assumption that DDT would have eradicated malaria. (But most mosquitos had already evolved immunity to DDT by the time it was banned.) While the science about DDT was long settled, Oreskes and Conway argue that the campaign to discredit Carson demonstrates why right-wing Cold War scientists turned against science itself: science had started to demonstrate “the limits of free-market capitalism.”

In their conclusion, Oreskes and Conway summarize how scientists like Singer and Seitz undermine effective policy by spreading doubt. By claiming that real scientific evidence doesn’t exist and insisting that their own made-up evidence is the truth, the merchants of doubt turn science into a political game. The media continues to give them airtime they don’t deserve in the name of “balance,” and the public often takes them seriously because they appear to be legitimate. They work for think tanks (which are funded by polluting corporations), publish in journals (which aren’t peer-reviewed), and appear to be experts (but mostly just criticize other scientists’ work). Even when there’s a clear scientific consensus, the merchants of doubt insist that more research needs to be done, which stops the government from taking action.

The merchants of doubt aren’t just in it for money: they are also motivated by a belief in “free market fundamentalism,” or the idea that the only way to preserve democracy, freedom, and technological progress is by rejecting all government regulation. Since they believe that regulation will lead to tyranny and technological progress will automatically solve all of the problems that the free markets create, they fight all regulation, no matter what the cost. As historians of science, Oreskes and Conway argue that free market fundamentalism is empirically inaccurate, but ever since the Cold War, this mindset has been deeply entrenched in many Americans.