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>> Kirsten Wiley: Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Kirsten Wiley. And I am
here today to introduce and welcome Naomi Oreskes, who is visiting us as part of the
Microsoft Research Visiting Speakers Series.
Naomi is here today to discuss her book "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of
Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming."
40 percent of Americans believe there's major scientific disagreement as to whether
global warming is real; yet few working climate scientists would dispute that it is
happening.
There are a cadre of people who have been extremely effective at spreading confusion
and seeding doubt about the dangers of cigarette smoking, the effects of acid rain,
existence of the ozone hole, and the problems caused by secondhand smoke.
Ideology and corporate interest has skewed public understanding and spread confusion
on many of the most important issues of our time.
Naomi is a professor of history in science studies at the University of California, San
Diego. Her study Beyond the Ivory Tower, published in Science, was a milestone in the
fight against global warming denial and was cited by Al Gore in an "Inconvenient Truth."
Please join me in welcoming Naomi to Microsoft.
[applause]
>> Naomi Oreskes: Hi. Well, thanks very much for coming today. It's a pleasure to be
here, especially because I was just two weeks ago at Google, and they all really like you
in Mountain View. So I don't know what that's all about, but anyway it's fun to be here
today.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Naomi Oreskes: Is that what it is? But I'm bipartisan. I talk at Microsoft. I talk at
Google. I don't take sides. In any event, so let's begin.
For me, the story has a couple of different beginnings, but one of them was when
Governor Schwarzenegger, my Austrian governor of the state of California announced an
initiative for the state of California to commit to Kyoto level reductions in greenhouse gas
emissions.
An when Governor Schwarzenegger announced AB 32, he made the following
declaration. He said: I say the debate is over. We know the science. We see the threat,
and we know the time for action is now.
Well, it's not every day you get to agree with a politician, but I thought that my governor
had it right. And indeed, in the mid-2000s, it seemed that most American people agreed.
A major poll done by the Gallop Polling organization in 2007 showed that 72 percent of
American citizens were completely or mostly convinced that global warming caused by
human activities was underway.
Indeed, 62 percent of us believed that life on earth would continue without major
disruption only if society took immediate and drastic action to reduce global warming.
And, indeed, at that time even many contrarians had come around. One of them was
Frank Luntz, the Republican polster and strategist, who in an interview in 2006 said: It's
now 2006. So he was off to a good start. He got the year right. "I think most people
would conclude that there is global warming taking place, and that the behavior of
humans is affecting the climate."
Now, Luntz is important to our story, because he was the author of a 2003 memo to
Republican candidates running for public office in the United States in which he talked
about the fact that Republican candidates were concerned vulnerable on environmental
issues because opinion polls consistently showed that a large majority of the American
people, 70 to 80 percent, believed that the government did have a role to play in
protecting the environment and believed that Democrats were more committed to
environmental protection than Republicans.
So in order to address this vulnerability, particularly on the issue of climate change, Luntz
advised Republican candidates running for public office to use the phrase "climate
change" rather than "global warming," because, he wrote, "climate change is a lot less
frightening."
Continuing this mode, he argued that the way for Republican candidates to win the global
warming debate was to emphasize scientific uncertainty and to insist that there was no
consensus in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change.
So he wrote, and all the emphasis here is his: The scientific debate remains open.
Voters believe that there's no consensus about global warming within the scientific
community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their
views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to
make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.
Well, was Luntz correct? Was his position factually correct? The short answer is no. In
2001, two years before that memo, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the
world's leading organization of climate researchers from around the globe, had declared,
in its third assessment report that: Human activities are modifying the concentration of
atmospheric constituents that absorb or scatter radiant energy. Most of the observed
warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse
gas concentrations.
So that was in 2001, in the third assessment report of the IPCC, based on their review of
the peer reviewed scientific literature. But, in fact, the scientific evidence had actually
coalesced even earlier.
In 1995, in the second assessment report of the IPCC, scientific experts had concluded
that the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human impact on global climate.
Now, I was interested in the question of whether or not these statements by the
leadership of scientific organizations were consistent with what rank and file scientists
had to say consistent with what you would actually find if you indeed read that peer
reviewed scientific literature. That's what I did, along with some research assistants, we
analyzed the scientific literature, using the ISI database, the Institute for Scientific
Information, and asked the question how many articles published in peer reviewed
scientific journals disagreed with that IPCC statement?
And the answer was: None. This was a study of papers published in the decade 1990 to
2000, and we found that no articles published in the peer reviewed journals of our sample
of about a thousand papers disagreed with or presented evidence to refute that
statement.
So I published that result in Science magazine in 2004. And the results surprised many
people. In fact, it actually surprised me. But really, in hindsight, it shouldn't have been a
surprise, because, in fact, the United States had signed, in 1992, the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change which committed the United States and 192 other
signatories to acting to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate
system. And that framework convention was, in fact, based on the emerging scientific
consensus that had developed at that time.
And when our first President Bush, President George H.W. Bush, signed the framework
convention, he called on world leaders to translate the document into concrete action to
protect the planet.
As a historian, I became interested in the question of what happened. If we had
agreement among 193 nations in the world including the United States, including our
Republican president about this issue, why didn't we take those concrete steps that our
first President Bush promised us?
So this is a historical story. I'm a historian of science. What I'd like to do today is give
you a super brief history of the evolution of climate science, just hitting on a few of the
major key historical milestones, then to tell you the story of the emergence of a political
challenge to that science.
It's a story of selling uncertainty, of merchandising doubt, and motivated by ideology, by
the belief in the power of free markets, a kind of doctrinaire commitment to laissez-faire
economics that was born and hardened in the Cold War.
So scientifically our story begins with the work of John Tyndall, who, in the 1850s, first
established what it means for something to be a greenhouse gas.
In a series of experiments on the radiative properties of gasses Tyndall showed that both
water vapor and carbon dioxide had the distinctive and important property of being highly
transparent to visible light, but relatively opaque to infrared. Therefore, allowing visible
light from the sun to come in, but tending to trap infrared that was reradiated from space
to earth.
And Tyndall recognized that the existence of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere was
a crucial fact about our planet, because without these greenhouse gasses, the earth
would be as cold as the moon or Mars and quite inhospitable for life.
Now, about 50 years later, Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish geochemist, one of the
founders of chemical thermodynamics, recognized that when you burn fossil fuels,
carbon dioxide is produced as a byproduct.
And that carbon dioxide would likely to just remain in the atmosphere and would increase
the greenhouse gas concentrations of the atmosphere, possibly changing the overall
climate of the earth.
Arrhenius did the first calculations of what the effect of doubling carbon dioxide would be
did and calculated that it would increase the average temperature of the globe between
one and a half and four and a half degrees Celsius.
Now Arrhenius was Swedish. He thought global warming would be a good thing. The
first person to suggest that it might be a bad thing and also to suggest that it might
actually already be underway was the British steam engineer Guy Stewart Callendar,
who, in 1938, published an article in the quarterly journal of the Royal Meteorological
Society in which he published and compiled the existing data on carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, compared it with existing data on temperature and suggested that carbon
dioxide was actually already beginning to creep up ever so slightly and that the
temperature might be increasing, too.
That was in 1938. But the following year, war broke out in Europe. Callendar went to
work for the Royal Air Force on deicing planes and other militarily important things, and
so he didn't come back to the issue for some time.
One important uncertainty that was recognized as early as the 1930s was the competing
effect of water vapor. So Tyndall had established that water vapor was an important
greenhouse gas as well. As most of us know, there's much more water vapor in the
atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
So one question that was raised early on was why would small changes of CO2 have an
impact on the atmosphere if carbon dioxide is swamped by the much greater quantities of
water vapor? Some people suggested that therefore small changes in CO2 would not
have much effect.
This question was taken up and resolved by Gilbert Plass in the 1950s, who was one of
the pioneers of upper atmosphere spectroscopy, one of the first people to use satellite
measurements to measure the atmospheric constituents of the upper atmosphere.
Plass resolved the absorption bands of water vapor and CO2 to a much greater degree
than had ever before done before and showed that although there was some overlap in
the absorption bands, there was also a very large area of nonoverlap suggesting that in
fact additional carbon dioxide would have a detectable impact on the total greenhouse
effect in the atmosphere.
Plass's work had a big impact on these two men: Hans Suess and Roger Revelle, both
oceanographers at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California where I first came
across their work in the archives.
In 1957, Revelle was working on the planning committee for the international geophysical
year, thinking about what satellite and other measurements could be taken by during IGY
that would answer scientific and important scientific questions. And one of these he
thought was the issue of the question and the effect of carbon dioxide.
And so in an article published in 1957, Suess and Ravelle suggested that by increasing
the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, that mankind was
performing what they called a great geophysical experiment.
That carbon dioxide had been stored in fossil fuels over hundreds of millions of years of
geological time and large amounts of this carbon dioxide were now being returned to the
atmosphere over the course of less than a century.
And so they proposed that as part of the international geophysical year, scientists should
begin to take systematic measurements of carbon dioxide to see if indeed it was
increasing and, if so, what impact, if any, it was having on the atmosphere.
This inventory, this monitoring of carbon dioxide, became the life's work of this man
Charles David Keeling, also a professor at the University of California, work for which he
won the National Medal of Science, awarded to him by President George W. Bush in the
2000s.
In 1958, Dave Keeling began what became his life's work, the systematic measurement
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Within just a few years Dave Keeling concluded that his own data were already
answering the question. That is to say that he discovered two things: First of all, a very
dramatic seasonal effect of carbon dioxide associated with photosynthesis in the
biosphere, but also a measurable, steady -- slow but steady increase in the total amount
of carbon dioxide. So by 1965, Dave believed that his data did in fact show that CO2
was creeping up from about 315 parts per million in the atmosphere when he began to
about 320 by 1965.
This led him and Ravelle to write what, as far as I can tell, was the first warning or the
first kind of alarm bell to be sounded by scientists to alert policymakers of what the
possible economic, social and political impact of this could be.
And in 1965, as part of a report of the President's Science Advisory Committee, Ravelle
and Keeling wrote: By the year 2000 there will be about 25 percent more carbon dioxide
in our atmosphere than are present and this will modify the heat balance of the
atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate could occur. They go on
to talk about sea level rise and other effects that could result from increased global
temperature.
Now, it's often said that scientists -- that politicians never listen to scientists but at least
one politician did. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson said, in a special message to Congress:
This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through
a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
So that was 1965. So already decades ago scientists were alerting politicians to the fact
that carbon dioxide was increasing; that it was a greenhouse gas, that it would be
expected to affect the climate. And those changes in the climate would have a series of
ramifying effects including sea level rise.
But in 1965, President Johnson had a few other things to worry about and not much
serious interest was generated in policy circles.
That began to change a few years later, with a historical development that is probably of
interest to people here at Microsoft, which was the rise of computer modeling of the
earth's climate system.
As all of you know, by the late 1960s and early '70s, there had been the development of
fast digital computers which made it possible for the first time to build general circulation
models that enabled scientists to study the earth's climate as a system.
So up until now scientists had been working with computer models as part of numerical
weather prediction, making 5-day forecasts. But for now for the first time, beginning to
modify those computer codes to study the climate system.
And to model the dynamics of the atmosphere in a quasi realistic way and to begin to
consider long-term trends.
And with this scientists like Suki Manabi [phonetic] and Kirk Brian [phonetic] at GFDL and
other places began to revisit what they came to call the calendar question and to build
state-of-the-art models which confirmed his and Arrhenius's earlier results.
This began then to lead to the first serious discussion of this question in policy circles in
the 1970s. A series of reports were issued by a number of different U.S. federal
agencies, including NOA, the National Research Council, and the Jason Committee of
the Department of Energy, all of which began to call attention to what were the likely or
possible impacts of global climate change should be.
This work was summarized in 1979 by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences who
wrote: A plethora of studies from diverse sources indicates a consensus that climate
changes will result from man's combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land use.
So we see that already in 1979 there was a consensus among scientific experts that
global warming was expected to occur. That it would happen.
In effect, a consensus about a theoretical expectation. And there was also consensus
that it was not a small concern. The National Research Council wrote: The close linkage
between man's welfare and the climatic regime within which his society has evolved
suggests that such climatic changes would have profound impacts on human society.
And I find this very interesting, because even today we're still grappling with this issue
and grappling with people who say: Oh, well, a degree two or three here, there, what's
the big deal. But the scientists, even in the 1970s, were trying to point out that human
civilization had evolved over a very short period of time.
I mean, most of everything we call civilization has evolved within the last 10 to 12,000
years, since the end of the last glacial maxim in a relatively narrow window of average
global temperature.
So there was agreement about experts that climate change would be expected to occur,
and there was an agreement amongst experts that it would matter.
The big question about which there was not yet agreement was when. When would
these changes occur? Most scientists thought that they were still pretty far away. That
detectible changes would not occur until the 21st century. If you read the scientific
literature reports from this period, dates like 2000, 2010, 2030, 2050 are being bandied
about.
So the surprising result was when detectible changes, or changes become detectible,
only six years later. When NASA climate modeler Jim Hansen and his team at the
Guided Institute for Space Studies concluded that the human fingerprint, the
anthropogenic signal, had in fact already become detectible in their data.
Hansen testified to this in the summer of 1998 as heat waves were racking the American
Midwest, declaring he and his team were 99 percent certain that climate change driven
by human facts by anthropogenic global warming was now detectible.
It was this emerging and data, disturbing data that climate change was happening more
rapidly than scientists had imagined that led in part to the creation of the IPCC in 1988.
But it also led to something else. It led to the emergence of a politically motivated
campaign to challenge that scientific consensus, to challenge the scientific data behind
Hansen and others' conclusions and to cast doubt upon that science.
The campaign focused on the claim that the science was unsettled, that there wasn't a
consensus amongst experts; that scientists were still arguing the point, and therefore it
would be premature for governments to act to intervene.
As a historian, I'm interested in origins, and it turns out that the origins of this claim can
actually be traced back to a surprisingly small number of people.
Now, today, doubt about climate science is promoted in many quarters. We hear it
promoted on Fox News. We see it promoted all over the Internet.
Many think tanks such as the Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, The Heartland
Foundation, The Competitive Enterprise Institute, there's a long list of people who now
promote doubt about climate science.
But one of the most important, one of the most persistent voices challenging climate
science, going back to 1988, going back to this period when the scientific evidence first
really came together, is the George C. Marshall Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C.
Since the late 1980s, The Marshall Institute has either denied the reality of climate
change or insisted if there is climate change that is not caused by human activities.
So where did The Marshall Institute come from? And why do they promote doubt about
peer reviewed climate science?
Well, The Marshall Institute was founded by three men. All physicists, all nuclear
physicists or rocket scientists who had built their careers in the Cold War working on
American nuclear weapons and rocketry programs.
On the left, Robert Jastrow, the original founder of the Marshall Institute, an
astrophysicist, head of The Goddard Institute for Space Studies who had been very
active in helping to develop the rocketry behind the Apollo program.
On the right, William Nierenberg, long-time director of Scripps Institute of Oceanography,
a nuclear physicist who had worked on isotope separation during the Manhattan Project
and subsequently became involved in many Navy-funded projects related to the Cold
War, including the accurate location of submarines for submarine launched ballistic
missiles.
In the center, Frederick Seitz, a solid state physicist who had worked with Eugene Vigner,
who is considered one of the fathers of the atomic bomb; the man who helped convince
Albert Einstein to write his famous letter to President Roosevelt advocating the building of
the bomb, who rose to prominence in 1950s and became president of the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences and then president of the Rockefeller University.
These three men had known each other for many years. They had served on many high
level scientific advisory committees. And in the early 1980s they found themselves
working together on an advisory panel to the Reagan Administration on the question of
strategic defense, or what most of us know as of Star Wars.
As many of you know, SDI was highly controversial among scientists because it was a
departure from the Cold War doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Because if the
United States believed that we had an effective missile defense shield, then we might be
tempted to launch a preemptive first strike against the Soviet Union.
And so for this, and a number of other reasons, both political and technical, American
scientists mobilized very actively against SDI. Over 6500 American scientists and
engineers, including many computer scientists, signed a petition declaring a boycott of
the SDI program.
Jastrow, Nierenberg and Seitz all supported SDI. They all considered it necessary for
American defense. And so in 1984, they created The Marshall Institute to defend SDI
against their colleagues's opposition and to promote the continued importance of science
and technology in national defense, in part by insisting on the reality of Soviet strength
and of U.S. weakness.
I don't have time to give you a lot of examples of the kinds of things they did. But they
organized workshops for journalists and congressional staffers. They wrote white
papers, articles, letters to editors; and my favorite one is this article published in National
Review in 1987: America has five years left. That's one scientific prediction that did not
come true.
Now, at this time, Fred Seitz had retired from his position as president of the Rockefeller
University, and he had taken on one last job in his retirement years, working as a
consultant to the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Corporation.
We know from tobacco litigation and from the work of historians like Robert Proctor and
Allen Brant that the principal strategy that the tobacco industry used to defend its product
against the scientific evidence of the harms of tobacco was doubt mongering, or what we
call in the book the tobacco strategy. To insist that the science was unsettled, to insist
that there was debate, continuing debate in the scientific community about harms from
tobacco, and therefore it would be premature for the government to act or discourage or
control tobacco use.
In 1989, these two stories came together. The Cold War ended rather more abruptly
than anyone had imagined would occur. The Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Union
began to break apart. So you might have thought that these cold warriors would have
been happy, that their life's work had achieved the goal they wanted, the collapse of the
Soviet and vindication and victory of the west. But instead of being happy, instead of
retiring contentedly and playing golf, our cold warriors kept fighting. But they had to find
a new enemy to fight.
And that new enemy was what they called environmental extremism. The exaggeration
of environmental threats or what they consider to be the exaggeration of environmental
threats by people with a left wing agenda.
And they applied the tobacco strategy that Fred Seitz had learned working for RJ
Reynolds, to insist that the science was unsettled.
Doubt is our product, ran the infamous memo written by one tobacco industry executive
in 1969; since it's the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the
minds of the general public.
One of the things that the tobacco industry recognized early on was that if doubt was
their product, they needed people to sell doubt. And they realized that if a tobacco
industry executive stood up in public and said, well, we're not really sure tobacco is
harmful, most of us would not find that highly credible. And certainly journalists would not
find that highly credible.
But if a scientist said it, and if particularly a prominent scientist, a former president of the
U.S. National Academy of Sciences said it, well, that was a different matter.
So a significant part of the tobacco strategy, what they sometimes referred to as Project
White Coat was to recruit prominent scientists, the more prominent the better, to sell the
message of doubt.
Now, they didn't have to be doctors. They didn't have to be oncologists, they didn't have
to be epidemiologists, because one of the things that tobacco industry found was that the
public didn't really know the difference between oncology and atmospheric chemists, and
journalists never asked. Journalists never said what actually is your specialty. Of course
we see this going on even today.
So the book, "Merchants of Doubt" is the story about the scientists who supplied doubt.
The scientists who were recruited by the tobacco industry and others to supply doubt but
not just about the harms of tobacco, although that's where the story begins, but a story
that runs through a whole series of issues then, a series of issues about which these men
became serial contrarians, in case after case after case, challenging the dominant
scientific view and supplying doubt about it over the course of the question of the threat
of nuclear winter and the efficacy of SDI, the reality of acid rain, and severity of the ozone
hole, and most recently, of course, the biggest issue of all of these, the human drivers of
global warming.
And in the book we also have a discussion of a kind of revisionist attack that is going on
today over the question of the science related to the pesticide DTD.
In the book we tell the story of how these prominent physicists cast doubt on the science
related to each and every one of these issues, how in every single case the playbook
was the same. In case after case after case, even for science that was totally different
and totally unrelated, they insisted that the science was too uncertain to justify
government action.
Now, to learn how they do it, you'll have to buy the book. What I want to talk about today
is what my colleague Eric Conway and I found to be in a way the most perplexing part of
the book and the part of the story that we felt most motivated to try to understand, which
was why they did it.
Why would prominent and distinguished scientists like Frederick Seitz, why would they
challenge the work of their own colleagues? Why would they reject data published in the
very journals they themselves had published their own scientific work during their own
scientific careers? Why would they doubt the work of people that they had hired in their
own institutions as was the case for Robert Jastrow? And also why this doubt mongering
campaign, why it worked, why it gained so much traction, especially on the conservative
or Republican side of the American political spectrum as we see today with so many
Republican leaders rejecting the scientific evidence?
And then helping then to explain why this issue became so politically polarized. So,
again, I don't have time to go into all the details of the book. So this is a kind of short
answer version. But the short answer is actually ideology. It's about belief systems and
belief structures.
When we started this work, almost everyone we spoke to thought we were going to tell
the story of a simple story of corruption, of people doing this for money, and it's really
important to point out that at no point during this story did we ever find any evidence that
any of the key players were predominantly motivated by money.
But, rather, we found abundant evidence that they were deeply motivated by their political
beliefs. And, in particular, by the belief that George Soros has termed free market
fundamentalism. That is to say a kind of abiding faith, a kind of overwhelming faith in the
power of free markets.
In the book we talk about this, and I think the best way to think about free market
fundamentalism and its role in American politics over the last 20, 30 years is to
understand it as sort of an end member of a spectrum of views that are broadly
categorized as modern neoliberalism. This is a set of views that have been very
predominant in the last 30 years focused on the importance or the power or efficacy of
deregulation and releasing the so-called magic of the marketplace. It came to
prominence in the early 1980s under Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and
Ronald Reagan here in the United States.
But it wasn't just conservatives and Republicans that promoted neoliberalism, it was also
promoted in the 1990s the so-called Washington consensus led by our democratic
President Bill Clinton and UK Labor Leader Tony Blair.
It has also been promoted heavily by the famous head of the Fed, Allen Greenspan, who
served five different presidents, both Republican and Democratic.
And indeed I think it's fair to say that right up until the global financial collapse over the
last few years, there has been, in political and economic circles, a bipartisan consensus
on the virtues of deregulation. (Latin).
Now, where did this all come from? Well, among conservative economists in the United
States, the principal inspiration for this comes from the Chicago economist Milton
Friedman, who published a seminal work quite worth reading in 1962 called "Capitalism
and Freedom." The crux of the argument is summarized by the title. Friedman argued
that capitalism and freedom are two sides of the same coin; that they have to go
together; that they inevitably go together, because without capitalism you won't have
freedom and without freedom you can't have capitalism.
Why? He argued if state governments attempt to control the economy, the only way they
can control economy is to control the people who are, the citizens who are the actors in
those economies.
So if you allow for the role of the government in the marketplace, it's only a matter of time
before the government will begin to control other aspects of your life like civic, political
and religious freedom.
And, therefore, the defense of free markets for Friedman was a defense of freedom.
Without which we would be on a slippery slope to tyranny. In "Capitalism and Freedom,"
which, by the way, was published in 1962, the very coldest year of the Cold War, at the
time of the Cuban missile crisis, Friedman acknowledges his debt to his intellectual
inspiration, the Austrian neoliberal economist Friedrich von Hayek, who in 1944 published
a deeply influential book called "The Road to Serfdom" in which he essentially argued the
same point, but not just about Soviet-style totalitarianism but even more liberal and
modest forms of western European social democracy, which he thought would put us on
a slippery slope towards the road to serfdom.
Now the contrarians in our story took this argument even further, arguing that
environmentalism was the slippery slope to socialism the path to creeping communism.
Why? Well if you look at it because environmentalists in general particularly in the last 30
years have tended to argue for the importance of government regulation, and they argue
that from regulation of acid rain or secondhand smoke, it was only a small step towards
government control more generally.
This idea was articulated in many of their writings but perhaps most clearly by a fourth
physicist who joins the story in the 1980s, a man by the name of S. Fred Singer, whose
personal biography was almost identical to the other three. He was also a Cold War
physicist. In fact, he was the proverbial rocket scientist, having worked on some of the
earliest American rocket launches, and also involved in repeated campaigns to challenge
scientific evidence related to acid rain, the ozone hole, and even continuing to this day,
just last week, he launched a new attack on the scientific evidence related to global
warming.
Now, I mentioned that Seitz had worked for the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company. In the
early 1990s we find Fred Singer working with Phillip Morris to attack the Environmental
Protection Agency over the issue of secondhand smoke.
In 1993, Singer and a lawyer named Ken Jeffries wrote a wrote called: EPA and the
Science of Environmental Tobacco Smoke. It was published -- Jeffries was a lawyer
affiliated with the Cato Institute and The Competitive Enterprise Institute, not a scientist.
Singer was a physicist, not an oncologist, not an epidemiologist. They wrote this report.
It was published by a fourth think tank, a group called The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute.
If you look at the documentation surrounding this report, which Eric and I have done, you
find that funding for this came from the tobacco institute which was a research center set
up by the tobacco industry.
So here you have in a nutshell, tells a whole other part of the story that we tell in the book
about the way in which the tobacco industry and later also the fossil fuel industry
funneled money into supposedly independent think tanks like the Alexis de Tocqueville to
write reports supporting the positions that were in fact the position of the tobacco
industry. Some of the memos we found even have things that say things like: We have
to be sure to cover the Phillip Morris fingerprints on this one, or we don't want any Phillip
Morris fingerprints on this one. So they create a whole network of think tanks.
In the book we talk about this, Eric and I counted 25 different think tanks we've been able
to identify that have been promoted doubt mongering about tobacco, global warming and
other issues, all of whom have received funding either from the tobacco industry or fossil
fuel industry, the chemical industry, all who claim to be independent and nonpartisan, all
whose activities are tax deductible because they are nonprofit and nonpartisan.
Okay. So why were they going after the EPA at this point? Well, there's a little sideline, I
love to tell the story, because it's one of the few times we find the tobacco industry
making a tactical mistake.
The guys who work for the tobacco industry were incredibly smart, had armies of really
smart, really hardworking lawyers. They rarely made big mistakes but they did make one
here.
The tobacco industry was very sensitive about language. They were always talking
about what they should call things. And they decided, in the early 1990s, they didn't like
the term "secondhand smoke." Because they reckoned that Americans didn't like
secondhand things. So they decided they would call it "environmental tobacco smoke"
instead. Thought "environmental" sounds kind of nice well, the only problem was that
this invited the scrutiny of the Environmental Protection Agency.
So in 1992 the Environmental Protection Agency reviewed the issue and declared
secondhand smoke to be a Class A or proven carcinogen. And some of you may know
about Class A carcinogens because, of course, World Health Organization has a whole
set of Class A, B, C proven, possible probable and as we've all heard a lot of discussion
about cell phones now in this whole category.
But Class A is the highest level of demonstrated, robust independent, replicable peer
reviewed data and this result was affirmed independently by the U.S. Surgeon General.
Indeed, the evidence was supported by over 10,000 different independent peer reviewed
studies in the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, Germany and elsewhere.
So why would a rocket scientist challenge these data? Indeed, why would any scientist
challenge these data? Well, the great thing about being a historian is how often people
answer these questions themselves. You don't have to speculate, because often people
tell you in their own words. And Fred Singer did exactly that. On page 2 of this report he
wrote: If we do not carefully delineate the government's role in regulating dangers,
there's essentially no limit to how much government can control our lives. So here you
see it, the road to serfdom, the slippery slope. If we let government tell us whether or not
we can smoke, it's only a matter of time before they'll control other things, including, of
course, the economy. And so then we begin to see the Milton Friedman argument
emerging here as well.
So in 1996, after the second assessment report of the IPCC, Fred Seitz, who was a
physicist, not an economist, wrote a report in the Wall Street Journal in which he alleged
that: IPCC reports are often called a consensus view. But if they lead to carbon taxes
and restraints on economic growth, they will almost certainly have a destructive impact
on the economies of the world.
So the governments will control our lives. Personally they'll control the economies and
we'll be on a slippery slope both to serfdom and economic collapse.
And Frank Luntz made a similar point in the Wall Street Journal. This time in 2003,
before his conversion.
So this is after the third assessment report of the IPCC Luntz writes: Once Republicans
can see that greenhouse gasses must be controlled, it will only be a matter of time before
they end up endorsing more economically damaging regulation.
So you see this idea that Republicans can't concede the science because if they concede
the science, well, then we'll have to endorse regulation.
And most recently we see this story continuing just a few weeks ago, some of you
probably know, that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney broke with many in
his party on Friday, this is from CBS, when he said that he believes that humans have
contributed to global warming. So Romney is the only one of the major Republican
candidates, or may be only one of the Republican candidates, interested in being the
next President of the United States, who are willing to say in public they accept the
scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change.
And when Romney made this announcement in Hanover, New Hampshire, Newt Gingrich
said the push to address climate change is the newest excuse to take control of our lives
by left wing intellectuals.
So we see this throughout the writings of contrarians, assertions that environmentalists
and also, by implication, scientists working on environmental issues have a hidden
agenda to control our lives.
It's a hidden agenda that is anti-business, anti-free market and anti-technology. And we
see often the allegations sometimes the overt accusation that environmentalists are in
fact socialists in disguise. They refer to environmentalists as watermelons: Green on the
outside, red on the inside.
George Will, who writes for the Washington Post, not generally considered to be a right
wing newspaper, has accused environmentalism of being a green tree with red roots.
And Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma who has threatened to indict climate scientists
for conspiracy to lie so Congress, has accused the scientists of being part of the liberal
conspiracy to bring down global capitalism, to which I reply that liberals should be so
organized.
Here's what Fred Singer had to say about this anti-business agenda, the hidden agenda.
In 1989, discussing the ozone hole, Fred Singer wrote: And then there are those
probably with hidden agendas of their own, not just to save the environment but to
change our economic system. Some of these coercive utopians are socialists. Some are
technology-hating Luddites. Most have a great desire to regulate on as large a scale as
possible. You see here repeated the accusation these people are socialists,
communists, they hate technology and they want to control our lives.
He continued a couple of years later: More dangerous are those who have a hidden
political agenda most often oriented against business, the free market and the capitalistic
system. Of course, after the collapse of socialism, it is no longer fashionable to argue for
state ownership of industrial concerns. The alternative is to control private firms by
regulating every step of every manufacturing process.
So what we see in all this repeatedly over and over again is that the debate is not about
the science. We do not actually see Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, Robert Jastrow, Bill
Nierenberg, raising principal concerns about the quality, quantity or diversity of the data.
We don't see them raising principal concerns about the peer reviewed process. Lately
we have seen people claiming to make those claims.
What we see them raising concerns about are about governance. And more specifically
about regulation. And we see them raising these concerns in the context of an
ideological commitment to laissez-faire economics, a belief in the inextricable link
between political and economic freedom, a kind of deep hostility to regulation as a form
of creeping communism, hostility that was born and nurtured and hardened in the Cold
War.
Now, of course many of these claims are a matter of opinion but not all of them are. And
as a historian I'm always interested in things that people say, people assert that are
demonstrably incorrect, if you know anything about history. There are many such claims
that we address in the book, but to me one that's most ironic is the claim that
environmentalism is a green tree with red roots.
Because we know a lot about the history of the environmental movement in the United
States, many wonderful books written about this question. The origins of the U.S.
environmental movement are not to be found in left wing politics, not to be found in the
labor movement, the international workers of the world, the socialist party, the communist
party, but in the progressive republicanism of Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinshow
[phonetic] and as I like to say that famous communist John D. Rockefeller.
Right up until the 1960s there was a bipartisan consensus in the United States about the
importance of land preservation and environmental protection.
So much so that when the Wilderness Act of 1964 began to designate American lands
that would be areas where man is a visitor and does not remain, it passed the U.S.
Senate by a vote of 73 to 12. And the House of Representatives by a vote of 373 to 1.
In the 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency, so hated by the tobacco industry and
so vilified today by Republicans in Congress and the utilities industry was created by the
Republican President Richard Nixon who signed into law the key pieces of environmental
legislation that remain the backbone of environmental protection today, including the
Clean Air Act, which is the basis under which the Supreme Court has found that the EPA
does in fact have legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
But things began to change in the 1980s. They began to change both scientifically and
politically. Scientifically, they began to change because scientists, not environmentalists,
but scientists working on the natural world began to discover evidence of serious
problems like acid rain, the ozone hole and global warming, problems that seemed to
demand some kind of government action, problems that seemed to many people to
demand some kind of government regulation.
And these issues emerged, and I would say that this is the kind of historical tragedy of
the story, a kind of just terrible bad luck, that the scientific evidence of these issues
began to coalesce just as the, in the historical moment when the Reagan Administration
was arguing for less government and less regulation, precisely as advocated by Milton
Friedman. Here we see Milton Friedman shaking hands with the president at the White
House.
And this I would argue, then, and we do argue in the book, put the Reagan
Administration, and later the entire neoliberal consensus on a collision course with
science, indeed on a collision course with our future.
Now, Ronald Reagan may have had a point. Government regulation is not the solution to
every problem. And some environmentalists are socialists.
Moreover, as a historian of science I'm quite comfortable in saying that the cutting edge
of science is always unsettled. There is always uncertainty in science. And there's
always room for reasonable doubt. But from the point of view of public policy, from the
point of view of making decisions about important issues that can affect our health, our
safety, our well-being and maybe trillions of dollars of infrastructure, the question
becomes what's reasonable?
History shows that the rejection of the scientific evidence regarding DTD, acid rain the
ozone hole and secondhand smoke wasn't reasonable. It wasn't based on reasonable
scientific doubt. In fact, it wasn't based on scientific doubt at all.
It was based on the desire to avoid government regulation of the products and activities
that created those problems because of the anxiety that those regulations would lead to
other unsatisfactory or undesirable things.
History also shows that DTD, nuclear winter acid rain and the harms of tobacco were all
real problems needing real solutions. One of the strangest things that I often hear
contrarians say, I sometimes get it in talks, sometimes get this on the radio, people will
say: I'm old enough to remember acid rain and the ozone hole. So I just don't believe
this latest anxiety about global warming. But I want to say: Wait a second, we were right
about acid rain, scientists was right about acid rain, there really was acid rain. It really
did kill forests and fish and there was an ozone hole. We fixed it because we did
something about it, we listened to the scientists. It's like a weird nonsequitur. Like I don't
know how acid rain and the ozone hole become evidence that global warming isn't real.
These were all real problems, problems in which science has been now confirmed many
times over. These were all issues where the scientists got it right and the doubt
mongerers got it wrong.
Finally, and perhaps most important as we move forward to try to address the problem of
global warming, history also shows us that free market capitalism, like any human
institution, has its limits. You don't have to be a communist or socialist to recognize the
problem that our economists colleagues call negative externalities. These are costs that
accrue to people who do not reap the benefits of the activities that generated them.
If you pick up any introductory textbook in economics you find that environmental
damage is the textbook case of the negative externality, a cost that's not reflected in the
market price of that good or service.
Indeed, this is the common thread that unites the diverse science challenged by the
Merchants of Doubt that in every case it involved a market failure. A case where the fair
market did not reflect these true costs. They were all examples of behaviors that
generated large external costs and therefore provided the possible warrant for
government intervention in the marketplace to replace those market failures.
Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist of The World Bank has called anthropogenic
global warming the greatest and widest ranging marketing failure ever seen.
So it's not surprising then, if we look at this larger history, that environmentalists,
Europeans, and those on the left of the spectrum, were quick to accept their reality.
People who accepted the idea that capitalism maybe had some limits weren't troubled by
evidence that that was true. But people who believed deeply in the power of free markets
were slower to accept the evidence.
The conservative jurist Richard Posner has argued that behavior that generates large
external costs provides an abdication for government regulations.
I don't know if you're familiar with Posner's recent book, "A Failure of Capitalism" but he's
a conservative who has become interested in the failures of regulation related to the
global financial crisis. He's exploring this issue of how do you decide when it's
appropriate for the government to intervene in a marketplace and when it's not.
And his argument is that when you see evidence of large external costs, that's when you
ought to be talking about government regulation.
But the point of this then is how we feel about regulation. How we feel about the idea of
unregulated markets is going to affect how we feel about those behaviors, whether it's
smoking or burning fossil fuels. Cognitive science has shown us over and over again that
we are all more likely to accept evidence consistent with our pre-existing world view.
But as Posner notes: A rational decision-maker starts with a prior probability but adjusts
that probability as new evidence comes to his attention.
History tells us that scientists have known for a very long time, for more than a century,
that global warming could occur from the burning of fossil fuels.
And for more than 20 years now evidence has been mounting that it is indeed occurring,
evidence that our scientists now tell us is, quote, unequivocal.
And, of course, one other point that should not be ignored is that the energy sector is not
a free market. I think this is the other second really big irony in this whole story.
The World Bank recently completed a study looking at the question of what subsidies,
global subsidies to fossil fuel production look like worldwide. The latest year for which
they have data is 2008. As of 2008, global subsidies fossil fuel consumption were
$700 billion a year.
We can compare that with the troubled assets recovery program, also known as the bank
bailout, which was also $700 billion. So we're bailing out the fossil fuel industry every
year. This is a TARP per year for the fossil fuel industry. So we might ask why we do
that and why the defenders of free market capitalism are not troubled by this massive
government intervention in the marketplace.
So to conclude: The industrial revolution brought the developed world 150 years of
unprecedented prosperity, a free lunch of historic proportions.
And, by and large, that prosperity has been a good thing. But as the economists tell us,
there's no free lunch. The prosperity we enjoyed was not actually free. Global warming
is the bill for that prosperity, a bill that has now come due.
And as Kim Stanley Robinson has pointed out, the invisible hand never picks up the
check. Thank you very much.
[applause]
>> Kirsten Wiley: Time for questions if anyone has any.
>> Naomi Oreskes: Sure.
>>: Have you encountered any link between the people and organizations discussed in
this book and the people who released the so-called Climategate e-mails?
>> Naomi Oreskes: We did. We didn't have time to write about it because that all
happened after the book came out. But the Cato Institute and The Heartland Institute,
who talked about in the bock have been very involved. We don't know who stole the
e-mails, the police have still not figured that out, Scotland Yard has not released any
information on that. But we do know the Cato Institute and Heartland Institute have
heavily funded defended the dissemination of the accusations surrounding those stolen
e-mails.
>>: I gotta say I found the talk very depressing.
>> Naomi Oreskes: Sorry about that. Well, if we had more time we could go out for a
drink.
>>: When things become ideologically based, seems like it's almost impossible to change
peoples' mind. Besides one of the Republican strategist, do you have hopeful stories
that have been on the doubter's side that have woken up and said I was wrong to think ->> Naomi Oreskes: Actually we do. And one of the things that's really depressing about
the story is that it kind of looked like that was happening in the mid-2000s, so it wasn't
just -- Newt Gingrich made a statement that he accepted -- I had a longer version of this
talk where I had actually a whole set of these people. And there were many people in the
mid-2000s. So we're saying, okay, we do have evidence of this.
But then it kind of went backwards after the election of President Obama, and now it
seems that the Republican party has hardened its position against the science. That's
very worrisome. I think you're right. Part of what's the heartbreak of the story, the way
it's become so politically polarized that you can't actually discuss the data with a lot of
people. And I get this all the time, and often even when I talk, there will be someone in
the audience who says I've been on the Internet, I've researched this and those data are
wrong.
It's like, well, who is it that's telling you the data are wrong? I mean it's the Cato Institute,
or it's not NOA, it's not NASA. It's not the U.S. Geological Survey it's not Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory.
The weirdest thing about this for me is that I'm going in November to talk to the
Department of Defense Environmental Research Symposium. In the military, the military
not only accepts the evidence is true but is preparing for it. The Navy has a Navy task
force on climate change that is looking at the question of how sea level rise and other
climate changes are going to affect Navy operations.
So it's a bit of a mystery to me why the people who are so entrenched in this issue aren't
moved by the fact that our admirals, and our generals take this seriously.
So I think it just shows how incredibly entrenched this thing has become now and how
much damage has been done to the state of the political debate in America.
>>: So your position of a doubter, it's sort of a logical gap, like you can propose the
argument that regulation hurts the economy. And that's fine. But then what do you do
about an activity that is still damaging?
>> Naomi Oreskes: Right.
>>: Are they expecting the free market to, eventually the economies will change and will
do something that's not damaging anymore? What is the solution to like the health
hazard?
>> Naomi Oreskes: There's a couple of different things. So I mean early on in the
debate, say one of the arguments that the tobacco industry made was that it's a free
country and it's for you to decide for yourself. You're a grown-up; if you want to smoke,
it's your decision.
And on some level that's a position that I'm personally sympathetic to. But if and only if
we have good information to make those decisions about. So, again, another irony of
this story, and of course this was one of Adam Smith's original principle, that for the
invisible hand to work, people had to have perfect information.
We know we never have perfect information, but we hope we could at least have pretty
decent information. The tobacco industry did everything possible to make sure that we
didn't have good information. So there's a kind of deep hypocrisy about that. It's also
why the secondhand smoke debate became so furious. And some of the most nefarious
things we talk about in the story happened not in the early debate about grownups
smoking, but in the debate over secondhand smoke. Because, of course, the tobacco
industry argument that it's a free country, you're a grownup, you can decide, breaks down
over secondhand smoke. Because if my smoking is killing you, killing my bartender,
killing my flight attendant, killing my children, which is when it really got ugly, that's a
whole different matter.
So they went really ballistic. There's a whole -- I have a whole other set of slides about
secondhand smoke and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which even today many
pediatricians don't know that Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, that secondhand smoke is
a causal factor in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Many pediatricians don't even know
that because the tobacco industry went to enormous lengths to suppress that data.
So that's kind of one contradiction in hypocrisy in the story. But the other part of it is -- so
there are kind of two nonhypocritical responses that people made. So one response was
to say the free market will do it. That if you just -- in fact, this is kind of the argument that
the Cato Institute makes, that part of the reason why you don't want the government
intervening is because if the government intervenes it distorts the market forces and it
actually prevents the market from responding in the way that it needs to.
And that's a very attractive argument, I think, and I think it would be fantastic if it were
true. The problem is the historical evidence just doesn't support it. We've known about
climate change now arguably for at least 20 years, and yet we aren't really making the
technological transformation to a low carbon energy that we need. So it is a market
failure because the market isn't doing what it needs to do.
Now, there's lots of arguments about why that might be. But most economists say that it
is because of the negative externality problem; that the price doesn't reflect the true cost.
So the solution then is to put a price on carbon. So then you get two solutions, right?
Carbon taxes or cap and trade systems. So yet a fourth or fifth or sixth irony of this story
is that, so Republicans are extremely hostile to cap and trade now, and it was
Republicans in the House that killed the cap and trade legislation last summer, but it was
actually Republicans and conservative economists who first developed the concept of
cap and trade, because cap and trade was supposed to be a market-based system.
It was supposed to invoke the power of the marketplace, put a price on carbon, we'll let
you trade it in the marketplace, freely trade it, businesses can decide for themselves what
the most effective way to do this is, have flexibility and the first Bush administration
supported cap and trade for acid rain, and in fact it was effective in the Midwest and in
Canada to control acid emissions. So the turning against cap and trade by the
Republicans in the United States to me is deeply cynical and deeply depressing,
because, you know, it was supposed to be a market-based mechanism.
Now we have this irony that some Republicans are now saying we should have a carbon
tax -- which is ironic beyond belief. Yet I find myself wanting to support them and say,
well, great, let's have a carbon tax, because actually that would be a simpler, in my
opinion, according to many economists, a carbon tax is a much simpler way of doing it
than a cap and trade system, but of course if we go back to the 1980s and '90s some of
us are old enough to remember that Republicans vilified Al Gore over the carbon tax
question, and we know that most Republicans really don't like taxes.
So it's a very difficult issue. I think that in my mind honest economists do recognize that
a carbon tax is probably the simplest and most efficient way to solve the problem
economically. The question is whether you can make it politically acceptable. Yeah.
>>: I'll have to dispute your last statement. Economists wouldn't say tax is most efficient,
they would say cap and trade is most efficient, opposing externalities show that. The
problem is that you have to assign somehow the correct amount that was pretty well
done on acid rain and sulfur dioxides, cap and trade worked well there. You also have to
assign the initial property rights. And that's an equity issue it's not an efficiency issue.
So I think you just misstated what --
>> Naomi Oreskes: Okay, I mean, there's disagreement about that.
>>: It's not disagreement, tax is not as efficient as imposing cap and trade.
>> Naomi Oreskes: A cap is not as efficient ->>: A cap and trade.
>> Naomi Oreskes: Is more efficient. Okay. I'm not an economist. I'm only going based
on what I know from the economists I've talked to. I have not studied this in great detail.
I have gotten the impression that most of my economic colleagues and academic
economic departments do think that a carbon tax would be a simpler and more efficient
mechanism. I might be wrong about that. So if you know more about it than I do I
respect that. My own view not being an expert is that I think we have evidence that either
one might work under the right circumstances, but it's sort of a political choice, which do
you think is more acceptable in the political circumstances you have.
But I will defer to you on that.
>>: Follow-up?
>> Naomi Oreskes: Sure, go ahead.
>>: Have you looked at applying your analysis to nuclear power?
>> Naomi Oreskes: In what particular way?
>>: In the particular way that there's a trade-off for carbon emissions?
>> Naomi Oreskes: You know, I've thought about it a little bit. I used to work in the
mining industry, and I worked in uranium exploration, so I at one point knew a lot about
the nuclear power industry. I haven't really studied it much in recent years. I've done a
little reading about it. But I haven't really done anything extensive, and I certainly don't
consider myself an expert on it. So my opinion would just be another person's opinion.
>>: You talked [inaudible] talked about science and politics. I mean, good calories and
bad calories. I mean, what's your take on that.
>> Naomi Oreskes: I'm sorry, on good terrorist/bad terrorist?
>>: Good calories and bad calories.
>>: [inaudible] calories?
>>: Calories by David Tau.
>> Naomi Oreskes: I don't think I'm understanding the question.
>>: Book is called "Good Calories/Bad Calories."
>> Naomi Oreskes: It's a book, I'm not familiar with that. I'm sorry.
>>: So looking at this little comic up here, I'm wondering what the impact of kind of
population growth in the developing countries is going to have on this stuff that we can do
as a developed nation to try and mitigate, right? Because I'm just worried that we can
put -- I think we should do everything we can, but then we've got this huge population
growth occurring that we can't stop.
>> Naomi Oreskes: And I get asked that question a lot, but I think it's really important to
note a couple of things about population growth. The vast majority of the greenhouse
gasses in the world are not being produced by developing nations. They're still being
produced by the industrialized nations, the United States, Germany, Japan and the
United Kingdom Europe and China as an emerging nation what the industrialized world
does is the most important thing.
The lion's share of both the greenhouse gasses that are produced per capita and
greenhouse gasses, the integrated greenhouse gasses that have been produced up to
date, still come from the industrialized nations, the United States and Europe. So it still
really matters what we do.
China, of course, is the next most important because China, China has now exceeded
the United States in per annum emissions, although not in per capita. But obviously what
we do matters because if we don't act, China says why should we act. It's a little bit of a
prisoner's dilemma, why should we act if the United States won't act, the United States
says why should we act if China won't act. So somebody's got to take this first step and
the United States does still have the biggest responsibility for the total CO2 and other
greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. The developing nations, the really poor nations,
are a very, very tiny fraction of the total greenhouse gas footprint and probably will
remain a very small fraction for quite a bit of time.
So the population thing is tricky because most of the population growth in the world is not
where most of the greenhouse gas production takes place. So I think the people who
focus on population growth as the main driver actually don't think that's right. It's not
population growth that's the driver. It's consumption growth. And total consumption.
And that's still mostly in the western world. Now, of course, eventually that will change,
but I know Neil Encarr [phonetic] has done some interesting modeling on this where he
looks how that might change in the future, but he still comes to the conclusion that for the
foreseeable future, up until the end of the 21st century, it's still 60 percent of the way of
greenhouse gas emissions is going to come from the industrialized nations, from
greenhouse gasses consumption, not population growth.
So ultimately population growth does become part of the story as countries develop and
presumably use more energy. But then by that point the other issue is, of course,
leadership. That I mean I'm not a Luddite, I'm pro technology, I think if there's any
solution to this problem, it has to be technological. Then the question becomes who is
going to develop that technology, who is going to sell it, who is going to make money off
it, who is going to create jobs, and there I think that whoever is out in front in developing
efficient solar energy, efficient wind power, other algae biofuels or whatever it is, those
countries will make money. Those countries will have a better balance of trade, those
countries will sell that technology to other countries and those countries will develop
leadership in the world if they then help the poorer nations develop by using these low
carbon technologies.
And one of the things I worry about, and again another irony or paradox of the story, so
China is moving forward very aggressively with solar and wind technology, much more
aggressively than the United States.
What message does it send to the world if China becomes the leader on this issue, if an
authoritarian country, which China still is, is able to actual offer remedies to this problem
and the liberal democracies prove paralyzed, what message does that send to the
developing world?
So I think it's enormously important what the United States does, and despite all the
reasons in my own work to be pessimistic, I still remain optimistic that ultimately we will
offer both political and technological leadership on this issue. But I have no evidence to
support that optimism. And that might be a good place to stop. I think we're out of time.
>> Kirsten Wiley: Thank you.
[applause]