Capitalism and the Environment Theme Analysis

Millions of pages of documents released during tobacco litigation demonstrate these links. They show the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt about the links between smoking and health risks. These documents—which have scarcely been studied except by lawyers and a handful of academics—also show that the same strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain, and the ozone hole.

Call it the “Tobacco Strategy.” Its target was science, and so it relied heavily on scientists—with guidance from industry lawyers and public relations experts—willing to hold the rifle and pull the trigger.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and regulatory compliance is a powerful form of necessity.

Did all of Singer’s efforts to discredit mainstream science matter? When asked in 1995 where he got his assessments of ozone depletion, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, probably the most powerful man in Congress at the time, said, “my assessment is from reading people like Fred Singer.”

The tobacco industry was worried, very worried. It was one thing to say that smokers accepted uncertain risks in exchange for certain pleasures, but quite another to say that they were killing their friends, neighbors, and even their own children. Philip Morris vice president Ellen Merlo put it this way: “All of us whose livelihoods depend upon tobacco sales—directly or indirectly—must band together into a unified force … it’s not a question of ‘are we going to do well or badly … this year?’ It’s a question of: ‘Are we going to be able to survive and continue to make a living in this industry in the years to come?’” The bottom line, she explained, was this: “If smokers can’t smoke on the way to work, at work, in stores, banks, restaurants, malls and other public places, they are going to smoke less,” and the industry was going to shrink.

Bad Science was a virtual self-help book for regulated industries, and it began with a set of emphatic sound-bite-sized “MESSAGES”:
1. Too often science is manipulated to fulfill a political agenda.
2. Government agencies … betray the public trust by violating principles of good science in a desire to achieve a political goal.
3. No agency is more guilty of adjusting science to support preconceived public policy prescriptions than the Environmental Protection Agency.
4. Public policy decisions that are based on bad science impose enormous economic costs on all aspects of society.
5. Like many studies before it, EPA’s recent report concerning environmental tobacco smoke allows political objectives to guide scientific research.
6. Proposals that seek to improve indoor air quality by singling out tobacco smoke only enable bad science to become a poor excuse for enacting new laws and jeopardizing individual liberties.

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.

Russell Seitz and the defenders of tobacco invoked liberty, too. But as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin sagely pointed out, liberty for wolves means death to lambs. Our society has always understood that freedoms are never absolute. This is what we mean by the rule of law.

Schelling’s attempt to ignore the cause of global warming was pretty peculiar. It was equivalent to arguing that medical researchers shouldn’t try to cure cancer, because that would be too expensive, and in any case people in the future might decide that dying from cancer is not so bad. But it was based on an ordinary economic principle—the same principle invoked by Fred Singer when discussing acid rain—namely, discounting. A dollar today is worth more to us than a dollar tomorrow and a lot more than a dollar a century from now, so we can “discount” faraway costs. This is what Schelling was doing, presuming that the changes under consideration were “beyond the lifetimes of contemporary decision-makers.”

Scientists have faced an ongoing misrepresentation of scientific evidence and historical facts that brands them as public enemies—even mass murderers—on the basis of phony facts.

There is a deep irony here. One of the great heroes of the anti-Communist political right wing—indeed one of the clearest, most reasoned voices against the risks of oppressive government, in general—was George Orwell, whose famous 1984 portrayed a government that manufactured fake histories to support its political program. Orwell coined the term “memory hole” to denote a system that destroyed inconvenient facts, and “Newspeak” for a language designed to constrain thought within politically acceptable bounds.

Accepting that by-products of industrial civilization were irreparably damaging the global environment was to accept the reality of market failure. It was to acknowledge the limits of free market capitalism.

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?

Cornucopians hold to a blind faith in technology that isn’t borne out by the historical evidence. We call it “technofideism.”

Why do they hold this belief when history shows it to be untrue? Again we turn to Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, where he claimed that “the great advances of civilization, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.” To historians of technology, this would be laughable had it not been written (five years after Sputnik) by one of the most influential economists of the second half of the twentieth century.

What this all adds up to—to return to our story—is that the doubt-mongering campaigns we have followed were not about science. They were about the proper role of government, particularly in redressing market failures. Because the results of scientific investigation seem to suggest that government really did need to intervene in the marketplace if pollution and public health were to be effectively addressed, the defenders of the free market refused to accept those results. The enemies of government regulation of the marketplace became the enemies of science.