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Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Merchants of Doubt, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science, Trust, and Public Policy
Capitalism and the Environment
Media Bias
Certainty, Doubt, and the Scientific Method
Summary
Analysis
In 1963, a group of U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists found highly acidic rain in New Hampshire’s remote Hubbard Brook woods. They were surprised and worried. Environmentalism was becoming a hot political issue at the time. For decades, both parties agreed on basic environmental policies, like preserving national parks. But in the 1960s and 1970s, policies like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act started generating controversy, because they called for the government to regulate environmentally harmful economic activity.
Environmental pollution issues like acid rain were perfect targets for the merchants of doubt because they took all the key characteristics of the tobacco debate to the next level. First, environmental policy pits a few corporations’ private self-interest against society’s overall public interest. Secondly, it raises the question of how extensively the government should be able to regulate the economy. And finally, pollution issues like acid rain are difficult for people to understand intuitively or see with the naked eye, which means that how seriously they take them depends entirely on how much they trust scientists.
Themes
By the 1970s, scientists knew that nitrogen and sulfur emissions from burning oil and coal were causing acid rain in remote places like Hubbard Brook. In 1971, Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin published the first comprehensive report on acid rain’s significant environmental dangers, and over the next few years, governments and scientists began studying it in much more depth. The evidence was clear: acid rain devastates fish populations, damages plants, corrodes buildings, and harms human health.
Acid rain’s effects are felt far from the places that cause it, which means that most of the people, animals, and ecosystems that it harms bear no responsibility for it. This makes it a useful model for thinking about the other environmental dangers that take center stage in the rest of the book. In all these cases, science illuminates the inherent conflict between corporate interests and the greater good.
Themes
In 1976, when Hubbard Brook researcher Gene Likens described the link between acid rain and mass fish die-offs in the American Chemical Society’s official magazine, it still wasn’t clear which human activities were causing it. Yet, within a few years, scientists learned to link acid rain back to specific sources through isotope studies and explain why it affects soils more than streams. By 1981, scientists had a complete and accurate model of it.
Themes
Political Action and the U.S.-Canadian Rift. Oreskes and Conway explain how, in 1979, European countries agreed to collectively limit air pollution (especially sulfur). Shortly thereafter, the U.S. and Canada came to a similar agreement and began cooperating on a 10-year study on acid rain. After all, most acid rain in Canada actually came from pollution originating in the U.S.
Themes
Get the entire Merchants of Doubt LitChart as a printable PDF.
Skepticism in the Reagan White House. Oreskes and Conway explain how Reagan’s pro-business, small-government ideology derailed the 10-year acid rain study. The study found a clear link between human emissions and worsening acid rain. Yet, in its official summary of the study¸ the U.S. government falsely called this link uncertain. One reason for this difference is certainly that Canada’s economy relies largely on forestry and fish, while the U.S. produces far more pollution. But the main reason for this difference is actually that the Reagan administration pressured scientists to alter the summary.
Themes
Getting a Third Opinion. Oreskes and Conway explain how, after the National Academy of Sciences reviewed the U.S.-Canada study and concluded that acid rain posed serious dangers, Reagan created his own independent panel to review these conclusions. As its chair, he chose William Nierenberg—the cofounder of the Marshall Institute, who had never studied acid rain but already served in several prominent positions under Reagan. Like Seitz and Jastrow, Nierenberg was a successful Cold War nuclear physicist who despised environmentalism and strongly supported the Vietnam War. He was opinionated and arrogant but also brilliant. For the panel, he selected men like the ozone researcher Sherwood Rowland, the fallout expert Lester Machta, and Gene Likens. At first, most of them agreed that acid rain was dangerous.
Themes
The Nierenberg Acid Rain Peer Review Panel. Oreskes and Conway summarize this panel’s review of the joint U.S.-Canada study. The panel concluded that acid rain is a serious problem and the government should take steps to reduce emissions. But a separate appendix suggested that there wasn’t yet enough data to justify government action. The author of this appendix was Fred Singer—the only member of the panel appointed directly by the White House, rather than by Nierenberg.
Themes
Another conservative, politically well-connected Cold War physicist, Fred Singer worked on major satellite programs (and frequently fought with other scientists) in the 1950s before moving to work primarily in policy. In the 1960s and early 70s, he was an environmentalist: he spoke out about the dangers of overconsumption and ecosystem collapse. But by 1978, he began questioning whether preserving clean air and water is a worthwhile economic decision, and three years later, he was publicly calling for total deregulation of the U.S. oil industry.
Themes
In 1982, the White House appointed Singer to Nierenberg’s panel, choosing him over candidates with far more relevant research experience. On the panel, he repeated the same argument he had made in a letter to Nierenberg earlier that year: the problem of acid rain was too complex to justify emissions reduction laws.
Themes
In June of 1983, the Nierenberg panel published a five-page interim report explaining that sulfur dioxide emissions were acidifying lakes, killing fish, and harming forests. But the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy struck out two paragraphs noting how these effects could cascade throughout the food chain and take decades to reverse. It also reordered paragraphs in the report, so that it would start by emphasizing the limits of existing research, rather than acid rain’s clear dangers and the need to stop it. In a related document, it added a new introduction by Fred Singer, who claimed that acid rain is not “life-threatening” and too costly to fix. Contrary to the panel’s conclusions, he proposed only limited, cost-effective emissions reductions.
In fact, during the panel’s discussions, Fred Singer repeated unproven claims from the energy industry and accused other scientists of exaggerating acid rain’s effects. He gave the eight other panelists documents explaining the Reagan administration’s policy objective: promoting the free market and finding technological solutions to environmental problems. Throughout the process, he insisted that resources like lakes shouldn’t be considered at all in government policy because scientists can’t prove that they have inherent monetary value. In a public rebuttal to the panel’s interim report, Singer wrongly insisted that there still wasn’t enough evidence on acid rain (which, he said, may even be beneficial).
Singer was also tasked with writing the report’s chapter about the costs and benefits of reducing acid rain. But he concluded that ecological damage has no measurable cost, so the benefits of stopping acid rain are zero. The rest of the panel refused to accept this conclusion and published Singer’s chapter as a separate appendix instead. Singer concluded that since analyzing the costs and benefits of emissions reduction is too difficult, the government should leave it to the free market by allowing companies to trade pollution rights and find the cheapest emissions reduction strategies on their own. Of course, this view reflected the administration’s official stance.
Themes
Based on the panel report, a congressional panel rejected acid rain legislation by a 10-9 vote. Business publications celebrated the decision and falsely claimed that scientists had barely studied acid rain.
Themes
Manipulating Peer Review. Oreskes and Conway explore why, even though Congress and the White House received the Nierenberg panel report in April 1984, it wasn’t released to the public until August. Two congressmen accused the Reagan administration of suppressing the report, but the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy replied that it wasn’t even finished until July. In fact, between April and July, the Office was editing the report’s executive summary to significantly weaken its conclusions. It never informed most of the panelists, who raised an outcry when they learned what had happened. Nierenberg publicly claimed not to know about the changes, but panelists’ testimony and documentation suggests that he actually made these changes, at the behest of the president’s chief science advisor.
Themes
For the rest of Reagan’s term, his administration refused all action to stop acid rain, and his science advisors kept claiming not to know what causes it. As with tobacco, the science actually was settled, but a few doubt-makers convinced the public otherwise. While honest scientists like Gene Likens continued publishing conclusive research about acid rain in academic journals, the popular business media kept claiming that the science was unsettled. It enthusiastically cited dissenting scientists like soil researcher Edward Krug, who repeated the widely debunked claim that natural processes were causing soil acidification, and Laurence Kulp, a Columbia geochemist who believed in using science to prove Christian principles.
In 1990, the George H.W. Bush administration finally started regulating sulfur dioxide emissions through a “cap and trade” program. In 2003, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded that this program had cost $8-9 billion, but saved $101-119 billion, over the previous decade. Contrary to the energy industry’s warnings, “protecting the environment didn’t produce economic devastation.”
Themes
Yet this market-based program didn’t go far enough. In 1999, Gene Likens and his colleagues found that acidification was still worsening at the Hubbard Brook forest, which was shrinking fast. And as of 2007, the George C. Marshall Institute is still calling acid rain a “largely hypothetical” threat that requires more research. Research by technology historians Margaret Taylor and David Hounshell suggests that strict regulation would control pollution far better than cap-and-trade, as it would give companies a true economic incentive to innovate in the field. But instead, “doubt-mongering” delayed the regulation process for years, and the scientists who did it began branching out into other fields.
