Merchants of Doubt

Merchants of Doubt explains how a small but loud group of researchers were able to mislead the public about the truths around global warming, tobacco, DDT, and other important issues for decades.

The tobacco industry went as far as to fund their own studies about the effects of smoking. They wanted to keep people buying their products. But they could only keep their secret for so long. Soon, people started to know what smoking really can do to the body. But it wasn’t until the 80’s that they even began to examine the effects of secondhand smoke.

In 1986, the US Surgeon General reported inhaling secondhand smoke to be just as harmful as smoking yourself. In 1992, the EPA issued a report that gave listed all of the ill-effects of secondhand smoke. But still, tobacco companies resisted. Instead of the earlier approach of attempting to shed doubt on specific studies, they instead decided to run a campaign that made people question the scientific process itself.

These companies refuted the credibility of the EPA’s combination of multiple studies for evidence, saying combining studies wasn’t sound science. They also fought the EPA for using studies that had only a 90 percent assurance of certainty. The tobacco business created reports that the EPA was using “junk” science and unjustly giving too much weight to imaginary problems. But these criticisms couldn’t be further from the truth. The EPA’s study was peer-reviewed twice in front of a panel of specialists and scientists.

In the 1970s, many environmental issues came to the center of US politics. One of these issues was acid rain, a phenomenon where rain falls with a lower than usual pH (acidic) causing plants and animals to suffer or die. Eventually, scientists linked this to the burning of fossil fuels and found that sometimes it can occur in places far from where the pollution happens. Soon after, scientists discovered that half of the acid rain falling in Canada was from US pollution. The rain was hurting the resources the Canadian economy was highly dependent on. Together, the US and Canada assembled scientists to research the phenomenon further. But just a year later, the US government assigned another panel of scientists to do the exact same thing. The government then took the liberty to go around the scientist in charge and assigned one of their own scientists on the panel. The scientist was Fred Singer, and they put him on the panel specifically to ensure the financial costs of the plan to prevent acid rain would be at a minimum. Because of Singer, the review was drastically altered, and it made the results in the study seem doubtful at best. And worse still, it…