Note: This transcript is auto generated and lightly edited.
NAOMI: And we live in a world where the science has really significant economic and political consequences. And so while we might like to stand back from the fray, think that's a luxury that we actually can't afford. Scientists have to be willing to step up to the plate and explain why science matters.
MONICA: Welcome to Policy for the Planet, a podcast exploring the global response to the climate crisis. We'll unravel the complex tradeoffs of different policy choices to steer us toward sustainable solutions and public well-being.
I'm Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Welcome to the conversation.
As technology and rapid communication advance, more and more knowledge is available at our fingertips. All it takes is a quick Google search to find out answers to questions you might have about everything.
But that much information isn't always a blessing. Search engines and artificial intelligence are saturating the world with disinformation, particularly around science and even more so around climate change.
Joining us today is Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. A world-renowned earth scientist, historian and public speaker, she is the author of the best-selling book, Merchants of Doubt and a leading voice on the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the role of disinformation in blocking climate action. Her newest book, The Big Myth: How
American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, was published this year.
Hello, Naomi, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you on and also an honor to have you on. You're a scientist, you're a historian, you're a professor, you're a writer with a lot of really interesting books out there. Can you tell us a bit about all these different hats that you have and how your different interests kind of converged to concerns over climate change?
NAOMI: Well, it's a pleasure to be with you as well. And I have to say, I don't really think of myself as wearing different hats. I think of myself as one person who does a variety of things. I mean, we all have different talents and I don't think any of us should ever feel like we have to just be in a box. But the thing that unifies all of my work is my interest in science and knowledge. So I began my career as a geologist. I loved the natural world. I liked being outdoors. As a kid, I collected rocks and minerals and bugs.
So geology was an exciting field to be in. It was exciting to learn to read the story of nature through rocks and minerals, to see things in nature that many people would just walk past because they wouldn't know how to look at it. But in doing that work, I also became interested in broader questions about the role of science in society and particularly epistemic questions, questions about knowledge. What does it mean to say we know that something is true? What is the work that scientists do in order to establish something as a fact.
And so I worked in that vein for about a decade after finishing graduate school, but then encountered the growing reality of people who were rejecting facts, particularly around the area of climate change. And so then I got interested in what some of us now call agnotology, the study of the social construction of ignorance. I'm interested in why people reject scientific evidence, and I'm interested in how they do that, how they persuade other people to reject hard-won information, even information that could be really helpful to their lives.
MONICA: So talk to us a little bit about that. I mean, what are your findings in that respect? Why is it that people choose ignorance? And why is it that they view certain subjects such as climate and climate issues as polarizing when in fact the evidence is out there for anyone to look and see?
NAOMI: Well, I would say for the most part, people don't choose ignorance. What we've witnessed in this country for more than half a century, actually, is that we have been bombarded by disinformation. And in our work, particularly in our most recent work, The Big Myth, but also in our earlier book, Merchants of Doubt, and when I say our, I'm referring to me and my co-author, Eric Conway. We looked at how corporate America began this program of disinformation, of bombarding us with misleading claims, misleading advertising, and sometimes outright lies, although usually it's more subtle than that, particularly regarding the harms of tobacco.
And what we showed in our work was that starting around in the 1950s, the tobacco industry confronted with the scientific reality that they were selling and aggressively marketing a product that killed people that was addictive and that they knew was addictive and killed people, their strategy was not to say, yikes, that was a bad choice. Maybe we should rethink what we're doing.
No, their strategy was to deny the scientific evidence, to attack science, and really to begin what became a half century long campaign to undermine public trust, not just in tobacco science, but in tobacco broadly. And what we discovered in our work was that many of the people who in the 1990s and 2000s were challenging the scientific evidence of climate change had been associated with the tobacco industry, had either worked with or for the tobacco industry and had used the same strategies and tactics that had developed in the tobacco story to challenge the scientific evidence of manmade climate change.
MONICA: Interesting. That's fascinating. I never would have made that connection, but it makes complete sense. mean, especially if you know a little bit about the history of what happened to the big tobacco industries and the big tobacco companies and all of that, that went down in the nineties. And I remember the movies about this and it just makes absolute sense when you put it in those terms.
Can you talk a little bit more about the polarizing aspect of climate change? Why does it polarize people so much?
NAOMI: Well, again, it doesn't polarize people. People have made this a polarizing issue. So one of the things we try to do in all of our work is to point out who are the people who are doing this? Because this didn't happen by accident, and it didn't happen as some kind of natural phenomenon. So again, what we've shown in our work is that if you ask the question, well, how do you persuade people of things that aren't true?
There's a couple of different ways you can do it. One of them is just to confuse people, create doubt, to say we don't really know.
And so a big, big part of the tobacco industry strategy was what we call merchandising or selling doubt to say, the science is unsettled. We don't know because studies show that if people think the science is unsettled, then they will say, okay, well, we'll just keep smoking until we find out more. So it's a very clever strategy because it really, plays on status quo bias that all, we all, all of us, including scientists tend to want to kind of stick with the devil we know rather than the devil we don't know.
And so in the face of uncertainty, most of us will just keep doing what we're doing. And the tobacco industry knew that and exploited it. But in addition, there's another component. As the evidence begins to mount that, no, the science is not uncertain, that actually tobacco kills people through lung cancer and 200 other horrible diseases, then you have to make a different kind of argument. And you can't just say, oh, yeah, it's fine to kill people.
Most people won't accept that. A few people will, but most won't. So you have to come up with a different kind of argument. You have to come up with an argument that makes it seem that you're defending something good rather than in fact selling something bad. And so the big argument that not just the tobacco industry, but also the fossil fuel and other regulated industries have used is freedom. It's to say, well, but do you want the government telling you what to do? Don't you want your freedom? Don't you want the right to decide for yourself whether or not you drive a big car, eat hamburgers, smoke cigarettes?
And that is a very compelling argument, particularly in the United States, where we've built a culture really founded on a very, I don't want to say extreme because that's like judgmental, but compared to other countries, a much more end member kind of focus on individual rights, individual liberty, individual autonomy compared with many other countries. And so by selling this idea of freedom, it gets people to align with the tobacco industry, even people who maybe aren't even cigarette smokers.
And so in our new book, The Big Myth, we show how for more than a century, even before the tobacco industry began their campaigns, right-wing business people in this country tried to make the argument that big government is bad, regulation is bad. You don't want the government regulating tobacco. You don't want the government
regulating fossil fuels. You don't even want the government regulating child labor because all of those things take away your freedom.
And what's just astonishing to us, we published this book two years ago as a kind of prelude or prequel to Merchants of Doubt, but boy have we seen these arguments come back with a vengeance in the last year.
MONICA: And what is fascinating about this is that it has definitely spilled over beyond the US because you see that freedom argument making its rounds everywhere, and especially where it pertains to climate, you see that. And it's just incredible how even in places where that kind of culture of individual entrepreneurship or whatever is not as ingrained. The argument still sticks, know, everybody kind of jumps on the freedom wagon and things like that.
NAOMI: Exactly, and it's not a coincidence. So again, what we've shown in our work is that corporate players have deliberately and actively tried to spread this argument around the globe. There's an organization known as the Atlas Network that is an umbrella group that coordinates more than 300 organizations around the world, particularly in Europe, but also in Asia, Africa, around the globe, Australia, New Zealand, to promote this idea that personal liberty, personal freedom is the most important thing.
And therefore it becomes a source of political polarization. People who are more likely to be on the conservative side of the political spectrum, be skeptical of, say in the United States, the federal government are more likely to align with those arguments. People who are on the left side, who tend to be more focused on the common good rather than individual rights. And so we see the deliberate polarization of the issue by parties with a vested interest. Yes, exactly.
MONICA: Yeah, that's really interesting. And it makes me think about, you know, places like Brazil, for example, which a few months ago was discussing bills on regulating pesticides, certain types of pesticides used in agricultural production. And the way by this discussion became huge in the country and the way by which, you know, they sort of went around trying to get Congress to vote, you know, the industry went about trying to get the vote.
Congress to vote against the pesticide bill, you know, to let pesticides be, so to speak, was freedom.
NAOMI: Right. we've never, if you think about the history of Western culture, we've never, going back to Hammurabi's code of 10 commandments, we've never thought that freedom meant the freedom to kill other people, right? To destroy other people's properties. And yet this campaign has been so effective and so powerful in part because of its persistence and also because they're clever and they hire good marketing and PR strategists. They've managed to create this idea that it would somehow be wrong to regulate pesticides, even when we have very strong evidence that these pesticides are super harmful to people in the natural environment. And Brazil is a really important case in point because until a few years ago, Brazil was actually a leader in climate mitigation because of the steps that had been taken to decrease deforestation. That was completely reversed under the Bolsonaro regime. Now it's being partly reversed again.
And so much of this has to do with the influence of multinational corporations, not just the obvious candidates like forestry companies, but as you said, the pesticide interests, the mining industry's interests who would like to see, you know, they would like to see an unbridled capitalism where capitalists get to do just more or less whatever they want, right, without, you know, weighing the legitimate competing concerns of Indigenous people, of biodiversity, and of all of us to live in a natural environment that is where we have clean air, clean water, and we're not threatened by catastrophic climate change.
MONICA: Is there a way you see that we can counter the freedom argument? Is there a way to get around that or to burst it?
NAOMI: Well, of course there is, of course there is because, well, two things. One, we just said, freedom doesn't mean the freedom to kill other people, right? Every society that has ever existed has always understood the concept of competing freedoms. Of course, I want to live my life the way I want to live, but you also want to live your life the way you want to live. And those two things are not always compatible. And that's why we have laws. That's why it's illegal to steal and to kill.
And so I think of environmental protection as in a way an extension of the prohibitions on theft and murder. Because if someone produces a deadly product, then that's killing someone or something. Or if climate change causes my house to burn down, that's a kind of theft of my property. I had a beautiful home. Look at all those people in Pacific Palisades, California, beautiful homes, people in North Carolina whose communities were destroyed by flooding. It's a kind of theft from those people. And so I think pointing that out is really key.
And then the other thing of course has to do with how we really live our lives. So the right-wing libertarians who want to argue against regulation, against governance, are really creating a false image of how we live. No one lives alone. As John Donne put it centuries ago, no man is an island and no woman is either. Although we women tend to kind of know this, we don't need to be told so much. No man is an island. We all live in communities.
And if a person truly lived, totally isolated, with no regard to anyone around them, we would call that person a sociopath, right? Normal, healthy people care about the people around them. We care about our families, we care about our friends, we care about our communities, our churches, our synagogues, our mosques. That's what it is to be a human being because we are social animals. And so the idea that we somehow should be making decisions in reckless disregard or isolation of other considerations, it's not just immoral, it's like radically unscientific.
And it goes against common sense. goes against everything we know about who we actually are.
MONICA: Yeah, and in that sense, it goes against nature in a lot of ways, right?
NAOMI: So there is this kind of disconnect, right, that the anti-climate change or the pro-market, free-market argument wants us to think about our moment, our place in isolation of all the other considerations. And so again, if you remind people, we have family, we have friends, we have relatives. And all of our, it's not just us personally who are being affected by this, but it's that whole network of family, friends and relationships. And I think when you point that out to people, I think many people see the logic of that.
MONICA: Yeah, but it is an effort, isn't it? And it's kind of an uphill battle given where we are.
NAOMI: It is, especially in this moment and especially given, you know, the literally hundreds of millions, not billions of dollars that have been spent on advertising, marketing, public relations campaigns to promote this sort of what I would call reckless, you know, free market unbridled capitalist model, as opposed to thinking through what is the, what is the right balance? And that's the other part of it. You know, one of the things that I think has been come harder in the year of social media is the nuanced argument has an uphill battle against the unnuanced argument.
So the guys who just say freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, that's a really simple argument. I say, well, hold on a minute. It's really about competing interests. It's about balancing different interests. It's about respecting other people's rights as well as my own. That takes more words to say.
MONICA: Yes. Yes. Yeah, a lot more and a lot more thinking and a lot more things.
NAOMI: Right, exactly. Right, well, I mean, it doesn't take that much more thinking, right, as we just said, just to stop for a minute and think about the fact that no man is an island.
MONICA: Well, that's the thing. mean, people have to stop, right? People have to sort of, you know, have that moment, which I think very few of us are having these days.
NAOMI: Right. And you see it now with what's going on with science in America now, you know, this massive, this massive assault on science, destruction of federal agencies that have existed for more than a hundred years. My husband was just telling me about the agency he worked for in which, I forgot the exact number of people who have now left or resigned or been fired or pushed out in one way or the other. And it comes out to something like 27,000 years of expertise that has been thrown away. Yes, I know. And of course, even if in the future we have a different president or a different Congress, you know, there's going be massive loss of knowledge, massive loss of institutional memory.
MONICA: Wow, my God. Well, you can't rebuild this. You can't rebuild this just like that, right?
So Naomi, let me switch gears and ask you because you have sort of defined climate change and climate change issues and the problems that we have around them in a very interesting way in terms of sort of characterizing them as chronic versus acute. Acute being things like diseases and epidemics and pandemics and so on.
Can you talk a little bit more about this concept for our listeners? Because it's so fascinating.
NAOMI: Sure. Well, again, I mean, this relates to how we started this conversation about pointing out that people don't choose ignorance, right? It's not, you know, to say why are people choosing ignorance is kind of unfair to people. And, you know, I see most of us as victims of disinformation, victims of propaganda. And so my goal is to really expose the propagandists and the purveyors of disinformation, not to blame the victim. But there's another component of this too, which has to do with what you just said.
The difference between an acute versus a chronic threat. And I think one of the reasons why climate change has been hard for all of us to really get our heads around, even those of us who accept the science, is that climate change is really a kind of chronic threat. And by that, I mean, we don't wake up tomorrow and suddenly face climate change. Well, actually now some of us are when fires hit our communities, but for many years, for decades, climate change was a sort of slow burning issue. was developing over time.
The science was accumulating gradually and many people thought about climate change as something that would happen in the future. And in that sense, it's similar to chronic disease. We all know that we should eat healthy, right? It's not really a mystery that fresh fruits and vegetables are better than ultra processed food. And yet many of us don't actually eat as well as we should. And why is that? Well, there are many reasons. And one of them is that we're bombarded by advertising and marketing for junk food.
But another reason is because the implications are off in the future. If I ate a bag of potato chips and got sick to my stomach tonight in a way that that would be good. We could all just stop eating potato chips, but it doesn't quite work that way. We put on weight, we get high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic disease down the road. And so the causal connection between the action and the consequence is deferred.
Right. And that makes it harder, it makes it harder for us to be motivated to act, even when we know the truth about it. And climate change is a lot like that. So we drive our car today, we turn on lights, we're talking on the internet. Well, actually my electricity is all solar power, but you know what I mean. But the climate change effect of that might happen tomorrow, next year, next decade, even next century. It's very deferred and it's diffused. The CO2 goes into the atmosphere, it affects the whole globe.
And maybe someone's house in California burns down, proof that we are all connected, but it's not necessarily my house that's burning down. And so again, that, that diffuse causal chain makes it harder for people to really feel motivated to do something about it and easier to say, yeah, I know it's true, but I'll deal with it tomorrow. Or yes, I know it's true, but electric cars cost too much money. And this is why government policy is so important. Electric cars are more expensive to buy in the, in the immediate moment.
But they actually save us money in the long run on fuel costs, on repair costs, and they save society money on damage that is avoided. But because I, as an individual consumer, don't necessarily benefit from the larger avoidance of social costs, that's why you need government policy. And that's why we have to stop subsidizing fossil fuels that are hurting people and do more to subsidize or give tax credits for positive energy changes that save us money in the long run.
MONICA: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. One thing that strikes me and I think we need to talk about, you've already mentioned it, the whole dismantling of science in the United States, which is graver in the United States for sure, but it is happening elsewhere. We do see it happening in other places as well. And we know how critical the science is to anything that we might do on the climate front and on the public health front for that matter because these two issues are so intimately related. And my question to you, which of course is a really hard one at this point, is how do we actually go about resolving these issues, trying to address them without the science?
NAOMI: That is a complicated question. So let me just say a few things. First of all, it's really important for people to understand why science is under attack. And it is. Because make no mistake about it, none of this has to do with saving the government money. None of this is about cost cutting. ⁓ We're going to lose a tremendous amount of money because of the loss of protective services that many of the agencies are for. It only takes one really bad hurricane to cause damage that would way exceed the annual budget of the hurricane forecasters.
So if the federal government wanted to save money, there are ways that could be done. And what is happening right now, there's no relationship to that. So this is an attack on science because science proves the costs of inadequately regulated capitalism. It's science that proved the harms of tobacco. It's science that's proved the reality and harms of climate change. And so the people who are unwilling to face the music about the true costs of their activities attack the messenger.
They attack scientists, they've been attacking science for decades, and now they're taking it one step further to just destroy the science altogether. So if you think about it, it's logical. They've spent decades saying they don't believe the science. Now they'll just say, well, we'll just get rid of the science because we don't like the message, so we'll kill the messenger. So it's kind of a classic strategy to shoot the messenger. And it's really important that people understand that.
MONICA: Yeah, very classic.
NAOMI: Now, where do we go from here? Well, you know, in the case of climate change, this is a slightly tricky question because of course, some of my best friends are climate scientists. I've spent a lot of time in the climate science community. I've published articles with climate science colleagues. I would argue that right now in the present moment, we have the science we need to act on climate. We've had that science for a long time.
We don't really need more scientific information to prove that burning fossil fuels and deforestation drives disruptive, damaging climate change. We know that. And so I do think it's really, really important for the scientific community to reiterate that message because it would be very easy in the present moment to say, my God, we can't address climate change without a lot more climate science, which in a weird way actually feeds into the denial message.
So why do we still need climate science? Interesting question. Well, one of the things has to do with forecasting, we just mentioned, hurricanes. Part of the role that climate scientists and weather forecasters are doing for us now is helping us avoid harm by being more aware of threats when they develop. And hurricane forecasting is really a brilliant example of the success of modern science because until about 50, 60 years ago, people knew kind of generally where hurricanes occurred. They knew there were a lot of them. And almost no way to forecast them, right?
And huge amounts of damage occurred because people were unprepared. We still see large amounts of damage because of how many people live in hurricane prone regions. But at least now we get accurate forecasting that people are able to prepare. They're able to evacuate. They're able to board up their windows. They're able to issue warnings ahead of time, get people out of low lying areas. There are many things that people can and in fact do do.
So that if you think about some of the recent damaging hurricanes we've had, even though they've done a lot of financial damage, a lot of cost and property damage, very few people have actually been killed in most of these hurricanes. And that is thanks to accurate hurricane science.
MONICA: Absolutely. That's a great point. I think that's a great point to underline and illustrate. While you were speaking, it made me think of recent tornado activity in the DC area, which is unusual, but there we go. And we now have the ability to get these tornado warnings in this region. And so I was thinking about that as you were talking about hurricanes and it goes in the same direction. Naomi, is there anything that you think we haven't talked about and you think is critical and we should say right now?
NAOMI: Well, I think the main thing I think about climate change, and especially as a person who studies both science and politics, many scientists don't want to be involved in the political side of the issue because they think it's messy, it's ugly, it's divisive. And part of the reason people are attracted to science in the first place is often the sense that it's not political, that it's about facts, and there's something clean and attractive about that. But I think scientists have to understand that we live in a political world.
And we live in a world where the science has really significant economic and political consequences. And so while we might like to stand back from the fray, think that's a luxury that we actually can't afford. Scientists have to be willing to step up to the plate and explain why science matters. It's a legitimate question for a taxpayer to say, well, why should my hard earned taxpayer money go to fund a hurricane center or renewable energy lab or an ecological research program.
And I don't think we as scientists have done enough to answer those questions. So I think the scientific community needs to step up to the plate. And then I think conversely taxpayers, ordinary citizens, all of us, anyone listening from, we have to think about, what can we do? I think many of us just sort of figure someone else is handling it. Someone else is taking care of it. But I think what we've seen in the current moment is that someone else isn't taking care of it.
In fact, quite the contrary, someone like Elon Musk steps up to the plate with no elected position, no position authorized by Congress, no legal authority at all, and has done massive amounts of destruction in a very short period of time. And seemingly no one is able to stop that. I mean, it's really incredible when you stop and breathe on that. So I think we all have to be thinking about what can we do in our homes and our institutions and our communities.
And in my recent work with Eric Conway, we talk a lot about government, but we also like to talk about governance. So the right wing has spent decades attacking the federal government, mostly through lies and disinformation. But the important thing for all of us to remember is government functions on many, levels. And many of us have the capacity to make changes in our communities, in our institutions, in our homes.
This is a moment where it's really essential that we all think about what are the things we can do? What are the levers of power that we have access to? Because I think one of the important things that I've learned watching people and talking, you know, I've between the two of us, Eric and I have lectured in all 50 states or lectured or worked or traveled. ⁓ You know, people want evidence of what can work. And it's very easy to say the federal government is inefficient. The federal government doesn't work, whether that's true or not.
We could argue until the cows come home, but it's also very often it's very, hard to judge. But as a member of a community, you often can see what's happening in my town, you know, what's happening on my school board, what's happening in my university. These are things where we can see what works and what doesn't. And so when people begin to be activated and do things that work in their communities, those provide models for other people and then people feel motivated and that can also be on a personal level. So, you know, I always make the point about.
My electricity is from my solar panels. Just to remind people, you know, if you live in a home that you own, which is not everyone, but it's many Americans, you don't have to be a prisoner of the fossil fuel industry. You could put solar panels on your roof. And yes, there is an upfront investment, but you get the money back in five, six, seven years. And you have the satisfaction, which to me, the priceless part, it's not just about the ROI. I used to get asked about this all the time. What's your ROI? Return on investment. like, my ROI is right this minute, knowing that I have done what I can to stop this problem.
MONICA: Well, I love that and I love that we ended on that note. Thank you so much, Naomi. It was a pleasure having you, having you with us on this show. Thank you.
NAOMI: You're welcome. Thank you.
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Special thanks to Jennifer Owens and Alex Martin, our producers, Melina Kolb, our supervising producer, and Steve Weisman, our editorial adviser. This podcast is brought to you by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Learn more at piie.com.
Until next time, here's to creating meaningful impact. Stay motivated, stay curious.
