In Shadow Elite, I trace the disturbing emergence over the past 2 decades of a new breed of unaccountable power broker. These players (I call those at the pinnacle "flexians") glide across roles of influence in government, business, media, and think tanks, use overlapping affiliations and information gleaned in one venue in other venues, and exploit a stranglehold on (should-be) public information to advance their own interests, not the public interest. Case in point is a group I call "the Neocon core," longtime ideological allies who sold America on the need to wage war on Iraq, by subverting the standard government bodies and processes and branding their own version of the truth as the most authoritative. In their new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway track another group of influencers, exerting power across a wide range of life-and-death debates over science and public health policy, everything from global warming to the dangers of cigarettes to acid rain. They argue that these same denialists, cropping up again and again, have pushed their version of the truth, driven not by scientific findings, but by their own personal, political agendas.
-Janine R. Wedel
In Shadow Elite, Janine Wedel asks, "What does it mean when individuals can no longer be embarrassed or ashamed?" When researching and writing Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, we wondered the same thing. How did these men (they were all men) justify the misrepresentation of scientific evidence? The personal attacks on colleagues, including vulnerable younger ones? The assured assertions in domains in which they had never published a peer-reviewed paper or had a grant proposal funded? The cynical manipulation and pressuring of the press? In short, how did they sleep at night?
The contrarians we studied--who systematically sought to undermine the scientific evidence of the harms of tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole, DDT and global warming--engaged in many of the same kinds of behavior as the 'flexians' described by Wedel. Building informal networks of action and influence, based heavily on personal contacts, they acted according to a weltanschauung forged in the Cold War that divided the world into friend or foe, and demonized environmentalists as communists or fellow travelers. Their ultimate goal was to prevent regulation, motivated by a neo-liberal ideology that saw economic freedoms as inextricably linked to political freedoms.
Like Wedel's flexians, they used access and influence to bill themselves as all-purpose experts and worked through a network of existing think-tanks and created a private one of their own - the George C. Marshall Institute. They shared convictions, acted in concert, and promoted their own views as the most authoritative scientific ones. To that end, they camouflaged a political debate as a scientific one, doing serious damage along the way both to individual scientists and to the credibility of science writ large. Even when their claims were shown, in some cases, to be demonstrably false, they declined to acknowledge this, often repeating refuted claims as if they were true. And the press continued to quote them, continued to treat them as real experts.
One might argue, of course, that the contrarians of Merchants of Doubt really did believe that they were right and everyone else was wrong. Indeed, this is what we argue. Frederick Seitz, William Nierenberg, and Robert Jastrow--the co-founders of the George C. Marshall Institute, a central focus of our book--shared the conviction that environmental threats were being exaggerated. By offering a 'calmer' view, they believed that they were helping to prevent heavy-handed government interference in the marketplace, and ultimately in our private affairs.
These political convictions--forged in the Cold War-- were so strongly held, that they blinded our 'flexians' to the mounting scientific evidence that acid rain, the ozone hole, second-hand smoke, and global warming were real problems, doing real damage. They also led to behavior that can only be explained as following the tenet--for which communists had been routinely excoriated in the Cold War--that the ends did justify the means.
The Marshall Institute never went so far as to attempt to re-write history, but another think tank, also well known for its doubts about climate science, has. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market public policy group in Washington, has promoted the claim that DDT was a safe and effective pesticide that should never have been banned. But it was banned, they say, because of hysteria, leading to millions of unnecessary deaths from malaria. For this, they assert, environmental pioneer Rachel Carson should be held personally responsible.
[M]illions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm. That person is Rachel Carson..."- a web site hosted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
The very idea that any one person was responsible for banning DDT is of course preposterous. No major political, social, or economic decision has ever been the result of the work of only one man or woman, and the decision to ban DDT in the United States came after a decade of work, study, and lobbying. It was supported in diverse quarters, including the President's Science Advisory Committee, the EPA, and the White House under President Richard M. Nixon. The American Enterprise Institute claims that banning DDT was "the worst thing Nixon ever did," so why not blame him, or his EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus, who formally made the decision to ban DDT in the United States? And of course, the ban never applied outside the United States, anyway.
The banning of DDT in the United States was not the work of a single person, but had it been, that person would be a hero not a demon. Major scientific studies have documented the serious harms that DDT poses to both human and non-human life, including, significantly, breast cancer. DDT is still in use in Africa (albeit in much more limited ways than in its heyday), and if malaria still prevails there it is not because DDT was wrongly abandoned. In 1976, the World Health Organization concluded that DDT had failed to eradicate malaria for a number of reasons; the most important was that insects had developed resistance.
Although the central claims of the "Rachel was wrong" campaign are demonstrably inaccurate, they have been repeated many times, including in the mainstream media. Why is the prestige press not ashamed to have printed claims whose inaccuracy could be demonstrated in a day of research? Who is holding the Competitive Enterprise Institute accountable for promoting canards? And who is noticing that the man defending DDT on the web pages of the Heartland Institute--yet another think tank that challenges climate science and defends DDT--is Bonner Cohen, who previously edited EPA Watch, an anti-EPA newsletter created by the tobacco industry?
It is often said that Joseph McCarthy's rampage against the U.S. Constitution finally began to unravel when Joseph Nye Welch, chief counsel for the U.S. army, demanded in outrage, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? Perhaps the time has come for us to ask the same question of the Merchants of Doubt and the Shadow Elite.
And of course, anyone with any insight into corporate behavior, particularly in the third world, can take it from there; previously, vast quantities of DDT had been blanketed across vast areas to ensure huge crops, mostly cotton (a single plantation would use more DDT than the malaria prevention programs of the entire country); in the process engendering DDT resistance in every insect around, malaria mosquitoes included.
If you have a little basic biological education under your belt (not a guarantee these days) you will of course come to the conclusion that the DDT "ban" in fact extended the lifespan of DDT for malaria prevention greatly, by reducing the rate at which such DDT resistance was created.
As a corollary, it is obvious that those inveighing against Rachel Carson, the DDT "ban", and environmentalists are either explicit shills for industry, or so woefully ignorant of reality and/or embedded in their own fantasy of victimization that you can't discuss with them. I've tried. And, obviously, they've never in their life had any interest or active part in eradicating malaria in the third world, other than trumpeting this bullshit charge.
Einstein's formula also accounts for the heat in our planet's crust, which is kept warm by a steady barrage of E = mc2 conversions occurring within unstable radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium. "When they decay, some of the mass is lost and a little energy is created, and that keeps the crust warm," says John Rigden, a physicist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness (Harvard, 2005). "So the temperature of the outer Earth, the crustal matter, is directly related to E = mc2."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/legacy.html
In Germany, when you buy a homeopathic product, you can be sure it is pure water or pure alcohol or a pure sugar tablet or lactose tablet. If you buy one in the US, you can't be sure it is pure water or pure alcohol or a pure sugar tablet or a pure lactose tablet.
If you're paying for nothing, then it is only fair that you get nothing.
Who cares whether global warming is man-made, due to historical climate cycles, or just Mother's Nature's way of saying she's sick of our behavior? Our goal - every one of us - should simply be to create and preserve the healthiest planet we can, and to do whatever we can to lessen the unnecessary suffering of our fellow inhabitants, be they human or not. If that means collectively sending a message to those who would jeopardize our health and lives for their personal gain, so be it. Those individuals count on the will of the masses being weak and disorganized. Whether they are safe in their assumptions is up to the rest of us, and each day, there are more of us than there are of them.
Much of the argument on global warming is from the liberal left. The US's own Gore a prime example. Here in the UK the BBC is the propaganda arm of the left on the issue. We have just had a major scandal where the so called Department of Climate Change at East Anglia University (UEA) falsified stats and then destroyed emails on the subject. And UEA feeds its figures into the UN 'INDEPENDENT' so called Panel on Climate Change.
There are as many fakes and hucksters on the liberal left in the UK as there are amongst bankers, politicians and oil companies on the right ! A plague on them all.
Those scientists were by the way cleared by the UK government.
By the way, you sound much more like one of those fakes and hucksters on the right than anything else..not the "reasonable seeming" middle ground you would like to claim for yourself.
Ironically - the exact opposite happened to the malaria vaccine - once thought to be a breakthrough in scientific engineering and technology the malaria vaccine could have represented a cure or even achieved the eradication of this disease across the globe - most certainly it would have at the very least been extremely beneficial. But a public outcry against the vaccine followed by numerous phony litigations ensued behind a backdrop of a larger movement against vaccines in general. This vaccine which was perfectly safe in nearly every study undertaken to demonstrate its side-effects was then removed from the market after a colossal drop in sales. And thus, we have no vaccine for malaria because of the herd effect and nothing more.
Isn't that irony for you? The toxic drug we used for decades to try to battle malaria was defended to its death while the safe vaccine for malaria was beaten to death by a fake public outcry.
Religion is dangerous -- ask any of the billions that have died in the name of religion -- including innocent iraqis and afghans as our military fights a holy war, not for jesus but for oil profits.
We live today in a world with almost 7 billion people in it. And, those people want food, water, a cellphone, and preferably, a Lexus, or better. Well, how's it feel to want? How's it feel to want to do things differently, but nobody listens to you, because you're one of those highly-educated environmentalist people, save the whales, and all that jazz?
People are people, and will do as they will do, and you can beat em over the head with the facts all day long, and not accomplish much besides making them mad, and wearing out your arm. Want change? Build the better mousetrap. Don't like DDT? Find a better way to kill bugs, and market it. Don't like oil-related pollution? Build the semi-truck that doesn't run on diesel fuel. But harping? Leave that to the angels.
There are better ways available but the large corporations fight every change that will effect their bottom line. The big corps will not give up oil money for wind or solar that in the end you could provide for yourself and just need a company to service your panel or windmill now and then. Why would the big banks stop gambling when they make a fortune doing it even at other people's expense? Why do Pharmaceutical companies sell us drugs to help our depression when the side effects could be worse or even death when there are better options? Why did G.W. Bush tell everyone to buy a Hummer when a low-mileage car would be a better option? Why would the big corps, banks etc. give up their mega profits without a fight? No, they have no sense of decency.
It's not just the money talking; it's the lack of critical thinking on the part of the listeners. That's why Rush is so popular.
cabal, ladies and gentlemen, cabal.
Dr. O. P. Sudrania
Huh?
Could you like give an example or something so I could get an idea of what you are saying? I have read your post five times now and I just can’t see your point, if there is one.
There are no "correct" answers, of course, only conjectures; but one of the most compelling is that any species which reaches the technological ability to control energies of that magnitude will inevitably cause its own extinction, or at least fall from its technological peak.
And of course, there's the general biological experience that any species which becomes overly dominant in an environment will sooner or later be subject to biological constraints; overgrow its food supply, become fodder for a plague or predator, etc. etc. etc. Those who feel that humans are exempt from this law because of our "intelligence" put forth a poor argument.
If you wish to revisit some aspect of science, it's also up to you to learn the background science so you can understand the literature.