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Edward Teller
Reagan was the president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative system and consistently promoted corporate interests over environmental protection concerns. To this end, his administration helped suppress its own panel report on acid rain and fought against regulation to ban ozone-killing CFCs. The “merchants of doubt” and their George C. Marshall Institute strongly supported his agenda in both areas.
Ronald Reagan Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Ronald Reagan or refer to Ronald Reagan. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3 Quotes
Whether or not the House Committee chairman believed Singer’s claims, his letter certainly would have had at least one effect: to make it appear that the committee was divided and there was real and serious scientific disagreement. The committee was divided, but it was divided 8–1, with the dissenter appointed by the Reagan White House.
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Chapter 4 Quotes
In short, Singer’s story had three major themes: the science is incomplete and uncertain; replacing CFCs will be difficult, dangerous, and expensive; and the scientific community is corrupt and motivated by self-interest and political ideology. The first was true, but the adaptive structure of the Montreal Protocol had accounted for it. The second was baseless. As for the third, considering Singer’s ties to the Reagan administration and the Heritage Foundation, and considering the venues in which he published, this was surely the pot calling the kettle black. And we now know what happened when CFCs were banned. Non-CFC refrigerants are now available that are more energy efficient—due to excellent engineering and stricter efficiency standards—than the materials they replaced, and they aren’t toxic, flammable, or corrosive.
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Chapter 5 Quotes
Anti-Communism had launched the weapons and rocketry programs that launched the careers of Singer, Seitz, and Nierenberg, and anti-Communism had underlain their politics since the days of Sputnik. Their defense of freedom was a defense against Soviet Communism. But somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
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Ronald Reagan Character Timeline in Merchants of Doubt
The timeline below shows where the character Ronald Reagan appears in Merchants of Doubt. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
...helped design the atomic bomb, Singer led the nation’s satellite program, and both publicly supported Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative on behalf of a conservative think tank called the George C. Marshall...
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Chapter 2
...began associating with fringe scientists, including a group of anti-communist Cold War physicists who defended Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). After conservative think tanks helped defeat Nixon’s plans to de-escalate tensions...
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...four years on a massive publicity campaign. Many “Team B” experts also worked on Ronald Reagan’s campaign, and once he was elected, they took charge of his foreign policy.
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Star Wars: The Strategic Defense Initiative. The authors describe President Reagan’s plan to set up a satellite-based ballistic missile defense system in outer space. The SDI...
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...originally presented it. Most scientists were liberals, but the conservative minority had outside influence—particularly under Reagan. Moreover, the National Academy of Sciences is a famously conservative agency, and hundreds of other...
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Chapter 3
Skepticism in the Reagan White House. Oreskes and Conway explain how Reagan’s pro-business, small-government ideology derailed the 10-year acid...
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...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...
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...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...
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...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...
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For the rest of Reagan’s term, his administration refused all action to stop acid rain, and his science advisors kept...
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Chapter 4
...the CFC ban “a success story” for science-based environmental regulation. Yet they note that industry, Reagan appointees, and conservative think tanks also consistently tried to derail the regulations through doubt-mongering. One...
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