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"What is the difference between a magician and a man who obscures the
truth about global warming for the fossil-fuel industry? Magicians are "moral liars," according to the illuminating new documentary
Merchants of Doubt,
by director Robert Kenner. That's because their magic acts use
expertise in the art of deception and misdirection to entertain. Shills
for the fossil fuel-industry, such as Steve Milloy,
Marc Morano and others examined and accused in this film, use their expertise to fool people about matters of life and death.
"The new documentary springs from the
2010 eponymous book by historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. The film (and
the book before it)
lays out how the fossil-fuel industry funds talking heads to sow
confusion about climate change in a deliberate imitation of the
successful doubt-sowing tactics of the tobacco industry. That industry
famously employed experts in public relations, starting with venerable
PR firm
Hill+Knowlton, to
cast doubt on the idea that smoking causes lung cancer or that nicotine
was addictive, tactics that delayed regulation of the tobacco industry
for decades.
...
"... Still, the ideological struggle over climate change has now raged for
nearly 30 years. It took 50 years but eventually the tobacco companies
were laid low and had to pay more than $200 billion in fines. Perhaps in
another 20 years or so climate change will be so obvious that the
ExxonMobils and Peabody Coals of the world will have to pay back some of their profits to compensate the victims of global warming.
"The problem is that in the meantime people will die too soon, rising
oceans will flood coastal cities and weird weather will make farming
harder, all serving as a '
threat multiplier'—as the U.S. military puts it. By revealing the little men behind the curtain of climate change denial maybe
Merchants of Doubt will help cut short this fight, because the world may not have that much time to waste."
The Guardian: