Since were on the topic of big tobacco lets talk some more about the shared histories of tobacco and climate denialism. In particular, lets focus on the fathers of climate denial: Frederick Seitz, William Nierenberg, Robert Jastrow, and S. Fred Singer (SandVol's homeboy).
Seitz began his corporate denial career (after retiring from Rockefeller University) as a consultant for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and later Phillip Morris International. Academic studies of tobacco industry influence (see: Legacy Tobacco Documents Library) concluded that Seitz, who helped allocate $45m of Reynolds' research funding, played a key role in helping the tobacco industry produce uncertainty concerning the health impacts of smoking.
Fred Seitz founded the George C. Marshall Institute in 1984 together with Nierenberg and Jastrow. Originally the institutes mission was to defend Reagans star wars program against criticism from the Union of Concerned Scientists by arguing for equal time in the media to air their views under the Fairness Doctrine. This has two-fold irony. First being that their organization only consisted of 3 members vs. 6500 in the UCS (reminiscent of the vocal minority of skeptics and creationists that demand equal time). Second being that in 1987 the Reagan administration killed the Fairness Doctrine, which it viewed as unnecessary government intervention in communications markets that chilled free speech.
Well the cold war ended and instead of disbanding the institute shifted its focus from defense to environmental skepticism. In 1990 they published the granddaddy of global warming skeptic literature entitled
Global Warming: What Does the Science Tell Us? in which they stated no warming was occurring, and even if it were there was no greenhouse problem because technology would enable adaptation
as long as the government did not interfere with the free market.
The institute teamed up with Fred Singer and took the views that tobacco was having no effect, that Acid Rain was not caused by human emissions, that ozone was not depleted by CFCs, that pesticides were not environmentally harmful, yada yada yada. Several scientists have joined and rapidly quit the GMI because, as former executive director Mathew Crawford put it, the institute was fonder of some facts than others. They contended a conflict of interest exists in the institutes funding. But besides being bankrolled by big oil and big tobacco, what else were their motivations? What did each ex-scientist have in common?
The answer is that they were all physicists working for cold war defense programs (Seitz even worked on the Manhattan Project down the road in Oak Ridge). They were all fiercely anti-communist and pro-capitalist. Their work repeatedly refers to environmentalists as watermelons green on the outside, but red on the inside. They called regulation "creeping communism". They are prototypical free market fundamentalists.
While they worked to defend the SDI they focused on nuclear winter, seismic verification, space technology, etc. Those were all related to the cold war, weapons, and rocketry programs areas where they had considerable experience and expertise. However, when the cold war ended and they shifted their focus towards anti-environmentalism, their credentials lost value. They have no expertise in the sciences related to climate change, ozone, acid rain, smoking, pesticides, etc. They offer no new explanations for observed phenomena. They only poke holes at established work, viciously and baselessly attack the reputation of mainstream scientists, and misrepresent scientific uncertainty as actual doubt. These were the EXACT SAME TACTICS used by the EXACT SAME PEOPLE in the tobacco carcinogenicity denial campaign. They dont do any scientific research or publish in peer-reviewed journals. Instead of debating scientists in the halls of science theyve resorted to spreading misinformation through books and op-eds, testifying before congress, and posing as experts on Faux Newz and the like.
They have disguised a political debate as a scientific one, and in doing so have greatly misrepresented the science, confused the American people, and delayed political action on one of the pressing global issues of our time.