Merchants of Doubt Themes

In Merchants of Doubt, historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway show how a small group of politically influential Cold War physicists (the titular “merchants of doubt”) have tried to systematically undermine the scientific consensus on a host of environmental and health issues, ranging from the dangers of secondhand smoke to the reality of climate change. Their genuine goal is not to correct bad science or get closer to the truth—in fact…

The “merchants of doubt” (politically influential scientists who try to cover up environmental and public health issues) are motivated primarily by an ideology that Oreskes and Conway call free market fundamentalism. They believe that a totally unregulated capitalist free market is the only way to preserve liberty and democracy. By extension, they worry that any government regulation at all—including simple laws to limit toxic pollution—will risk turning the United States into an authoritarian dictatorship…

Oreskes and Conway call the contrarian physicists at the center of this book “merchants of doubt” because their strategy depends on paralyzing serious science through uncertainty, and not disproving it through evidence. Ever since tobacco companies invented this tactic in the 1950s, contrarians have assumed—often rightly—that the government won’t pass environmental regulations so long as they can “keep the controversy alive.” For instance, researchers fully understood acid rain by 1981. But when William Nierenberg and…