The Manufacture of Denial
- Introduction
- The George C. Marshall Institute: From Mutually Assured Destruction to Star Wars
- White House Interference in the Acid Rain Report
- “A Backdoor to Communism?” Fred Singer and the Fight Against the Montreal Protocol
- Revelle, Schelling, Nordhaus: From Outright Denial to Organized Delay
- George H.W. Bush’s “White House Effect”
- The New Quality of Climate Denial
- Trump 2.0: From Denial to Destruction
- Carbon Capture as a New Form of Denial
- Difference, Export, and Convergence of Denial
- Full version
Introduction
Biography of Naomi Oreskes
Naomi Oreskes is an Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.
An earth scientist, historian and public speaker, she is the author of The Rejection of Continental Drift : Theory and Method in American Earth Science (Oxford University Press,1999), co-author with Erik M.Conway of the best-selling book Merchants of Doubts (Bloomsbury, 2010) - subject of a documentary film of the same name - and of Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean (The University of Chigaco Press, 2021) among others.
She is 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.
Biography of Naomi Oreskes
Naomi Oreskes is an Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.
An earth scientist, historian and public speaker, she is the author of The Rejection of Continental Drift : Theory and Method in American Earth Science (Oxford University Press,1999), co-author with Erik M.Conway of the best-selling book Merchants of Doubts (Bloomsbury, 2010) - subject of a documentary film of the same name - and of Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean (The University of Chigaco Press, 2021) among others.
She is 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.
Prolog
Until recently, it was assumed that the climax of climate denialism was behind us. The future, we were told, belonged to green capitalism and sustainable development. Convinced by both financial and political incentives, even the administrators of fossil capital had made their peace with energy transition.
The late 2010s was indeed a time of momentous global climate action: pressured by a vigorous transnational citizens’ movement and large-scale Climate Marches, western governments vowed to meet ambitious goals. Both the European Green Deal and the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act were templates of this moment. The new zeitgeist even extended to the private sector with the three largest international consulting firms making climate-friendly commitments of their own. However, the subsequent rise of the far right, tragically embodied by Donald Trump's return to power, has produced a violent backlash. No longer constrained by the strictures of greenwashing, the engineers of climate denial take their cue from the White House’s cynicism to revamp their long-discarded arguments.
These are the people that Naomi Oreskes calls “the merchants of doubt”. In her seminal eponymous book, co-authored with Erik Conway and published in 2010, the American historian showed how, as early as the 1980s, a small group of scientists moved by common ideological convictions and economic interests sought to downplay the risks associated with smoking, acid rain, and nuclear winter. With the financial and political support of the Reagan administration, the purpose of their indefatigable work was to sow doubt and question the motives of scientific research in order to justify political inaction.
In time, the same actors applied their biases and techniques to climate, first by denying global warming altogether, then by questioning its impact and challenging its attribution to human causes. Of recent, however, the rise of authoritarianism has enabled them to pursue a new agenda. Instead of discrediting scientific data, their aim is now to eliminate the agencies and organizations that produce them. While in the Reagan era, the goal was to question the work of serious scientists, under Trump, it is to prevent them from working.
Naomi Oreskes traces the long history of fighting facts to protect the fossil fuel industry from regulation. She emphasizes the asymmetrical character of in the battle between, on the one hand, powerful players who stand to lose a great deal in the event of real climate action and use their proximity to power to maintain the status quo, and, on the other hand, the ordinary citizens of Bangladesh, the Maldives, or the Gulf of Mexico, who would stand to gain a great deal if global warming was seriously tackled but who have no say in the matter.
On climate, more than on any other issue, the far right and its publicists are relying on a devastating and highly effective weapon: the deliberate production of ignorance.
Our interview took place in Boston on March 24th, 2025.
Prolog
Until recently, it was assumed that the climax of climate denialism was behind us. The future, we were told, belonged to green capitalism and sustainable development. Convinced by both financial and political incentives, even the administrators of fossil capital had made their peace with energy transition.
The late 2010s was indeed a time of momentous global climate action: pressured by a vigorous transnational citizens’ movement and large-scale Climate Marches, western governments vowed to meet ambitious goals. Both the European Green Deal and the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act were templates of this moment. The new zeitgeist even extended to the private sector with the three largest international consulting firms making climate-friendly commitments of their own. However, the subsequent rise of the far right, tragically embodied by Donald Trump's return to power, has produced a violent backlash. No longer constrained by the strictures of greenwashing, the engineers of climate denial take their cue from the White House’s cynicism to revamp their long-discarded arguments.
These are the people that Naomi Oreskes calls “the merchants of doubt”. In her seminal eponymous book, co-authored with Erik Conway and published in 2010, the American historian showed how, as early as the 1980s, a small group of scientists moved by common ideological convictions and economic interests sought to downplay the risks associated with smoking, acid rain, and nuclear winter. With the financial and political support of the Reagan administration, the purpose of their indefatigable work was to sow doubt and question the motives of scientific research in order to justify political inaction.
In time, the same actors applied their biases and techniques to climate, first by denying global warming altogether, then by questioning its impact and challenging its attribution to human causes. Of recent, however, the rise of authoritarianism has enabled them to pursue a new agenda. Instead of discrediting scientific data, their aim is now to eliminate the agencies and organizations that produce them. While in the Reagan era, the goal was to question the work of serious scientists, under Trump, it is to prevent them from working.
Naomi Oreskes traces the long history of fighting facts to protect the fossil fuel industry from regulation. She emphasizes the asymmetrical character of in the battle between, on the one hand, powerful players who stand to lose a great deal in the event of real climate action and use their proximity to power to maintain the status quo, and, on the other hand, the ordinary citizens of Bangladesh, the Maldives, or the Gulf of Mexico, who would stand to gain a great deal if global warming was seriously tackled but who have no say in the matter.
On climate, more than on any other issue, the far right and its publicists are relying on a devastating and highly effective weapon: the deliberate production of ignorance.
Our interview took place in Boston on March 24th, 2025.