Lifting the Curtain on Climate Change Denial - Ep 141: Prof Naomi Oreskes

Naomi Oreskes  
I started getting hate mail, threatening phone calls, death threats. And then I started digging a little bit, and what we discovered was really, frankly, terrifying story of 100 years of propaganda. This should really be the central question of economics in my mind right now, right here. And if we don't figure out a way, like, as you said earlier, if we don't figure out a way to reach people's hearts, we can have the best technology in the world and we'd still be back where we started.

Michael Liebreich  
Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich, and this is Cleaning Up. And it's a very special episode today, because I've asked my great friend, Bryony Worthington, Baroness Worthington, who joined us on Episode 25 of Cleaning Up to guest-host a few episodes of Cleaning Up this season. Bryony, you might recall, was the lead author of the UK's groundbreaking Climate Change Act back in 2008. And she's now on a sabbatical from her role in the House of Lords where she has been scrutinising legislation and working really hard. She's now over in California. So Bryony, welcome to the hot seat as guest host of Cleaning Up and you now get to say those immortal words. 

Bryony Worthington  
Hello. I'm Bryony Worthington, and this is Cleaning Up.

Michael Liebreich  
So Bryony, who have you got for us today? 

Bryony Worthington  
Well, Michael, I'm really pleased that I was able to sit down with Naomi Oreskes, Professor Naomi Oreskes, who is a Harvard professor who has been studying the history of science over decades and is a world-renowned author, and somebody that I really was looking forward to speaking to. 

Michael Liebreich  
That's tremendous. And I've read two of Naomi Oreskes' books, Professor Oreskes' books. There's one on plate tectonics, which is actually about how- not so much about the plate tectonics, the geology, but how the theory of tectonics propagated against stiff resistance through the scientific community. So it's more of a sort of sociology of the science rather than the science. And then, of course, the, the extraordinary Merchants of Doubt, which shone a light on so much bad behaviour, didn't it? 

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, that's exactly right. And he's become a specialist in unpicking these stories of where we've all been subjected to quite a high degree of propaganda that's kind of slowed progress against many of the environmental issues that you and I care about. So she's really got an amazing perspective on this issue of climate change. And she has been a real leader in this space.

Michael Liebreich  
 And there's a kind of playbook that like the tobacco industry, and then the oil and gas industry used and the chemicals industry around DDT. So she's really unpicked that. And she's got a new book, hasn't she? 

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, exactly. So she has now published a book called The Big Myth, which goes one stage even further, looking at how has it been the case that we've all become anti-government and anti-regulation, anti-environmental regulations, and all been seduced by this idea of the magic of the free market. And so it's a really interesting exploration of that huge topic. 

Michael Liebreich  
That's right. So the subtitle there is "how we learn to loathe the government and love the free market". Well look, I'm really looking forward to listening to the conversation. Bryony, welcome to the hot seat as guest host of Cleaning Up and take it away.

Bryony Worthington  
 Thank you very much, Michael. I'm very much looking forward to it.

Michael Liebreich  
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Bryony Worthington  
Right, well, hello, welcome Naomi. It's such a delight to be with you today. And I really wanted to just have a conversation with you about the work that you've been doing and these amazing books that you've written and the impact that you've had. And so but rather than me try and give a kind of potted summary of you know who you are, I'm sure most people know who you are, would you be- would you mind just introducing yourself in your own words? 

Naomi Oreskes  
Sure. I'm Naomi Oreskes. I'm the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. I'm also an affiliated professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences. I'm the author of a number of books including Merchants of Doubt, which I co authored with Eric Conway, Why Trust Science? which is about why we should trust science, and my most recent book, The Big Myth: how American business taught us to loathe government and love the free market, also co-authored with Erik Conway.

Bryony Worthington  
Excellent. And, I wonder if you could just explain to us how it came- how it came to be that you wrote the Merchants of Doubt, which is perhaps- certainly the book that that introduced you to me, I'd love to hear the story of how that came about. 

Naomi Oreskes  
Sure. Well, I'm a historian of science by training. My specialty is Earth and environmental Science. So I study the development of scientific knowledge about the Earth and the natural environment. I came to that through a background in geology; my undergraduate degree is in mining geology, from Imperial College, part of the University of London. I worked as a professional exploration geologist in the outback of Australia for three years, then came back to the States to pursue a PhD in Earth science at Stanford, thinking that I would become a geology professor. But I always had a lot of other interests. I always found it a little hard to decide- as a student it's hard to decide what to study because I had a lot of different interests and they were interests that people told me didn't go together, like geology and history, or, you know, physics and philosophy. And so I was told I had to choose, I couldn't do both. So I chose science for a variety of reasons. But then I discovered that that actually wasn't true, you actually didn't have to choose. And there was this field called History and Philosophy of Science, where you could look at science in broader social context, you could think about philosophical issues in science, such as, you know, what do we mean by evidence? What does it mean to say that something is evidence for a theory? And how do we know when we have enough evidence to say that something is proven scientifically? Those questions really interested me. There were people in philosophy of science who were working on it, but they were all working on physics. There was almost no one at that time working on these questions in, in contemporary Earth science. And I thought that Earth  science was interesting, because it was, in fact, in many ways, quite different from physics. And also, I was in graduate school in the 1980s, when climate change was just starting to emerge as an issue. Radioactive waste disposal was a big issue. At that time, I had friends who went to work for the Department of Energy on radioactive waste issues, acid rain, the ozone hole, there were these big issues that were on the front page of the newspaper, in which Earth Science was a big part of the answer to these questions about whether these were real problems, and if so how to address them. And so I just had this instinct, which I'm happy to say in hindsight was right, that Earth science was going to become more important in the years to come, and people would become more interested in these questions about scientific knowledge emerging from the earth sciences. And so I took a bit of a leap of faith, threw away my scientific career, well, I didn't really throw it away, I still feel like I use my scientific training every day of my life. But people thought I was throwing away my scientific career, people said to me, "Why are you doing this? You're a good scientist.: And I would say, "Well, it's because I am a good scientist that I could do this." So it was a bit of a leap of faith, there was definitely a point at which I thought that I would not have an academic career, and I'd end up going to work for an NGO or something, which probably would have been fine to, or maybe go to law school, which also would have been fine. But it did work out. It turned out my instincts were right. People did- people were interested in these questions. And so, I began to focus my work in history of science. And after I got tenure, I took on a project, a big project that I knew was going to be- take a while. I wanted to write a book, looking specifically at the question of what difference it makes who funds scientific research? So it was really a question about objectivity. We know that science is supposed to be objective, but we also know that nobody really is objective. So how in the world do scientists achieve objective knowledge when scientists are fallible, subjective human beings? And how do funding structures influence not just what scientists work on, but how they work on it, how they think about the problems they're facing? And so I decided to look at it in the science of oceanography, partly because I liked oceanography, I thought was interesting. I was teaching at the time at the University of California in San Diego that had one of the world's great oceanographic institutions and more important, one of the world's great oceanographic archives. And also, because in oceanography, there was this very clear change that happened starting around 1939. Until 1939, American oceanography was extremely poorly funded. There were essentially no jobs. No one in the United States called themselves a professor of oceanography. They could in Germany, but not in the United States. But that changed with the outbreak of World War Two, when money began to flow very abundantly into oceanography because of its relevance for submarine warfare. And so the science really changed dramatically over a quite short period of time. And so, you know, in history, we don't have experiments, but sometimes you can find something that's happened. It's almost like an actual experiment. So this felt like the closest I could come to a natural experiment where there'd been a really big change in the external conditions of scientific work, and I could look at how it affected what science was done. So this is a slightly long answer to your question, but I'm a historian. So I have to tell you the history and you asked! So while I was writing that book, I came across a really interesting set of papers from a group of oceanographers whose names are very famous now but weren't so famous then: Roger Revelle and Dave Keeling. And it's from the 1950s, and they are discussing climate change. They are discussing the possibility that burning fossil fuels will change the climate by increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we know that it's increased, well, we know that it's being put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. So what effect is that having? And this conversation is taking place in the mid-1950s and it becomes the basis for Dave Keeling taking on the work that is very famous today, which becomes the Keeling Curve, the famous graph that shows how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased over this period of time. And so I started digging more into the background science to try to better understand what the question was scientifically, who had worked on it, how they had worked on it. And in doing this, it became evident to me - and I'm doing this work now, around the year 2003, 2004 - it became quite evident to me that there was a scientific consensus that climate change - manmade climate change was underway, that it was serious, it would have adverse effects. But that's not how it was being presented in the mass media. And it wasn't how politicians were talking about it. And I remember very, very clearly an interview that then Vice President Dick Cheney gave on television where he said, "well you know, I think there's a consensus that climate change is happening, but there's no consensus about what's causing it." And I knew that was completely incorrect. What I didn't know was whether the vic president was just ignorant, confused, or lying. So I was at the time naive, and I thought, "Oh, he just doesn't know." I was so innocent! So I wrote a paper called The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change in which I laid out the evidence that there was, in fact, a scientific consensus, not just on the fact of manmade climate change, or the fact of climate change, but the fact of manmade climate change. And then, in fact, this is what the question had been all along. The scientific question was never is there climate change? And then as a separate question, what's causing it? The question was always is burning fossil fuels changing the climate? Because we have theoretical reason to believe that it should. And the question is, are we actually seeing it happening? So I wrote that paper, and that was my Alice Through the Looking Glass moment, that's when my life changed. I started getting hate mail, threatening phone calls, death threats, complaints lodged with my university that I was a fraudulent historian, because everyone knew that there was a big fight about climate change, dso if I couldn't see it, then obviously there was something wrong with me. And I just thought this was all pretty weird, upsetting, slightly frightening. And so I started talking to colleagues about what was happening. And as it happened, one of them was Erik Conway, who at the time, I did not know, but I was at a conference, a group of us went out for beers afterwards, and I started telling the story about what was going on. And Erik said to me, 'well, Naomi, the people who are attacking you are the same people who attack Sherry Rowland and the scientists who prove the ozone hole.' And I said, 'What wait, huh? Did you just mention my name in the same sentence as Sherry Rowland, who was one of my heroes, I think, you know, one of the most important scientists in the 20th century? In part, because he did both crucially important Nobel Prize winning scientific work, but also played the role of what I call a "scientific sentinel", someone who's willing to stand up in public and say, "Look, pay attention, something bad is happening here and we need to address it." So Erik said, 'yeah, there was this whole big campaign to try to discredit Sherry Rowland to attack the science relating to the ozone hole.' I knew nothing about that at the time. But Erik said, 'Yeah, I've got a whole file of stuff on this, I'll send you.' So I got home and he sent it to me. And sure enough, they were the same people. And one of them was Frederick Seitz who was a former president of the US National Academy of Sciences. And I thought that was really weird that a president of the US National Academy of Sciences would be attacking a fellow scientist who had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work. And so I had this vague idea- I mean I had heard of Seitz who is a pretty famous person. And then I started digging a little bit and discovered that he had worked for the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company. So I have a good colleague, Robert Proctor at Stanford, maybe you've met him, who's done extensive work on the history of tobacco disinformation. I called Robert up and I said, 'Robert, do you know anything about Fred Seitz?' And Robert says, 'Do I know anything about Fred Seitz?!' So now another big package of materials lands on my desk and it's this really extensive set of documents about Seitz's work for the tobacco industry, denying the harms of tobacco. So at that point, I started to see a story, that these same people who had denied the harms of tobacco, denied the reality of the ozone hole, now were denying the reality of climate change. And so this was my leap of faith moment. Second leap of faith, first one was becoming a historian of science. I called Erik up and I said, 'I feel like there's a story here. Do you want to write a paper with me on this?' He took a leap of faith and said yes. We scarcely knew each other, we'd met once at this conference. So we wrote a paper, we got along. And then I said, 'I feel like there might be a book here. What do you think?' And so we took another leap of faith and wrote this book. And so that's a long answer to your question. But that's how Merchants of Doubt came to be. It's not something we planned. We didn't grow up thinking 'when I grow up, I'm going to be a historian of disinformation.' But it's the story that we discovered, and we realised needed to be told.

Bryony Worthington  
And what was the response to the book? I mean, it was a successful book. It was also made into a documentary. But did you, yeah- what what happened as a result of this story that you brought out into the- into the, into the daylight, right, this thread that runs through a lot of these - disinformation is one word for it, but this kind of antagonistic, trying to deny or combat the scientific voices of the day who are calling out problems, externalities, right? Things that are threatening the integrity of our planet, or are big environmental threats, or big threats to our health? So what was the response?

Naomi Oreskes  
Well, I'd say mostly good. I mean, as you said, the book sold very well. It wasn't an overnight sensation. People think that in hindsight, but it wasn't. I mean, it took time, for sort of the word to get out about it. And there were definitely people at first who didn't quite understand it. There were people whose reaction was the, I don't know, kind of making a mountain out of a molehill. It's just a story about for old, retired physicists, like who cares? I think some people didn't see it, that these physicists- you know, the story is connected, this physicist stands for this much larger network. And we thought we were sort of lucky that we found this manageable story that, in a nutshell encapsulates this much larger story about networks of disinformation that were growing at the time and are even bigger now. But a lot of people did get it. I think a lot of people were pretty astonished. They had no idea this was going on the scientific community in particular, it was very gratifying because a lot of climate scientists wrote us emails saying things like, "wow, like, your book made me so happy." And I'm thinking, happy? Really? and they say, "yes because now I know I'm not crazy, that I'm not paranoid, that it felt like something weird was going on, it didn't feel like this was a normal scientific debate. And now you've explained why." And so I think we really helped the scientific community to understand that this was not a problem problem of public understanding of science, it wasn't a problem of scientific illiteracy, but it was a much different and, frankly, much more difficult problem.

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, and, well-funded, and had had a couple of outings, so they've perfected the tools right? And the doubt- the title is Merchants of Doubt. And it's that that's so clever that, you know, science isn't about reaching 100% certainty. It's always about testing hypotheses. So if you can pour doubt into the equation, and slow everything down, that's all they need to do really, is just slow things down, right? So they have that on their side. And it's just the exact copying of the tactics through from tobacco into ozone into DDT before that, I mean, there's- it's happened repeatedly. So by the time we get to climate, they really know how to run this show, right?

Naomi Oreskes  
And I think that's part of the power of the story, that we're able to show how the same people using the same arguments over and over again, as you say, they hone the arguments, they perfect them. And in a way, their job is easier than our job because as they themselves say they don't have to persuade us that there is no climate change, they just have to sow doubt, they just have to persuade us that we're not really sure, because they know from their own market research that if people think the science is unsettled, they won't be motivated to act. Whereas if they know the science is settled, or very, very solid, let's just say, then they will be motivated to act. And again, that was an insight that came out of the tobacco industry, who had done market research that showed that if people thought the science was proven that smoking causes cancer and other dreadful diseases, they would be highly motivated to try to quit. Whereas if they thought the science was not settled, then they would say, "Well, I like smoking. I'll just keep smoking until the scientists figure it out."

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah. And so this particular group of individuals, these four physicists, they appear repeatedly in these different stories, but behind it is a much bigger story about how we perceive the role of government or how we govern problems that affect the global commons, right? Where it's not about something that can be solved locally, how do we solve those sorts of problems? And that's kind of what led you to the next, well, to the latest book, right that there was something even bigger behind all of this, which was really about how do you sell the concept of freedom as a as an anti-government and anti-regulation, anti-environmental concept? And do you want to tell us a little bit how you went from Merchants of Doubt to the newer book?

Naomi Oreskes  
Sure. Well it's exactly what you just said. In a way, it's like the Russian nesting dolls. So the story begins with people, educated people, rejecting climate science. And we, naive as we were 20 years ago said, "well, why would intelligent educated people reject science? That seems really weird." And then we find out that there's this political ideology behind it. And as you say, it's really a question about governance and the role of government, in protecting people against harms, addressing market failure and dealing with problems of the global commons. How do we address a problem that affects the whole world? So what we found in doing that work, based on reading these people's- their own letters, their own writings, the conversations they had among themselves, is that they're really motivated by a market fundamentalist ideology. And it comes out of their Cold War, anti-communism. So these are men who have spent their whole lives building and designing weapons programmes to contain communism, to fight the Soviet Union, to win the Cold War. And they understand their project as a project of containing communism, even if they do it through science and technology. What they fear, though, at the end of the Cold War, is that even though we've won the Cold War, and we may still lose a bigger battle for freedom and democracy, how is that? Why did they think that? Well, because they've accepted this argument that we talk about more in the new book, that if the government ("the government" - any government, state, federal international) "intervenes", and I'm putting that in scare quotes, because I reject the language of intervention, because I think that's part of the problem. But if the government acts in the marketplace, that this represents a threat to freedom, and we're on the slippery slope, to socialism, communism and Soviet-style totalitarianism, and it's very clear from their writings that they believe this, and there's many- there are places where they say this, you know, the government- and this helps to explain why they make common cause with the tobacco industry. You might think that controlling, regulating tobacco is a good idea, protect health, save 6 million lives a year, that seems kind of like an obvious good, but they say "no, it's not because this threat to freedom." And I do actually believe that these men view this sincerely. I think it was exploited insincerely by some other folks. But I think everything we saw suggested that this was a sincere and authentic belief. So- sorry go ahead

Speaker 3  
No, because there is this question, because it's easy to characterise this, as, you know, kind of a very cynical ploy, by people with vested interests, right, the tobacco industry clearly was hugely delighted to find that they had this powerful weapon, but the people who started it, as you say, had a genuine concern; it was a period when there was a fear about communism, and that this would threaten, you know, the American dream, right? But is that- I guess one question I have is, to what extent do you think it was the companies involved, kind of- there's a lovely quote in your book which says that, you know, 'freedom for the wolf is slaughter for the lamb' right? So this concept of freedom and individual freedom, it sort of breaks down when you think about the fact that if you're a very powerful entity, and it's your freedom at the expense of everybody else's freedom, that's not an ideal outcome at all. And so how cynical do you think it was? And who were the most cynical actors? Was it all just about protecting the wolves? You know?

Naomi Oreskes  
So this is really the argument of the new book, The Big Myth. And so here we have a whole lot more cynicism, right? Although even there, I mean, I think one of the- I think things rarely succeed if the motivations are only cynical, because I think that people have a pretty high radar for self-interest and greed. But if you can combine the cynical interest with something that seems to be legitimate or authentic, like an argument about freedom, then there's a greater chance that it will succeed. And that's really the story we tell in this new book. So in the new book, we look at a much longer, deeper history of market fundamentalism. And the question we ask is, "well, why did these people"- again, before it was "Why would intelligent, educated people accept climate change?" Now it's "why would intelligent educated people accept market fundamentalism?" When we have so much evidence that market failure is a real thing, even conservative economists recognise that, it's been recognised for a long time. And we have so much evidence that these problems, as you put it, of global commons are real, I mean, the ozone hole is the quintessential example. People using a legal product were doing something that was threatening the very existence of life on Earth. And that's something people have forgotten, people have forgotten how serious the ozone hole was that if we didn't do something about it, the amount of ultraviolet radiation reaching the planet - the surface of the planet - was going to be enough to kill people. So that's a classic global commons problem, how do we protect the whole planet even though the self-interest of individuals might say that it makes sense to use these chemicals or the self-interest of the company selling them? So this was the question. And what we discovered was a really, frankly, terrifying story of 100 years of propaganda. And it doesn't mean that everyone who participated in this project was 100% cynical, but it's pretty clear that a lot of them were. And one of the questions I get asked about the new book is how do we know it was propaganda? Well, a couple of things. One is the people involved said so! There's places where they basically say, "we need to have a campaign to convince the American people not to support -you know -minimum wage laws or not to support unions, but to just let us do what we want," right. Second is that they, at one point, they say, "well, what we really need is we need to recruit an expert to help us to figure out- who will help us figure out how to do this," for example, someone like Edward Bernays. Edward Bernays wrote the book Propaganda, literally wrote the book on propaganda -that's the title of the book - in the 1920s, and is considered one of the founders of public relations. He was also a nephew of Sigmund Freud, which tells you something right. He was very interested in psychology and psychological manipulation. And he had a long history of working for the tobacco industry. And he is in fact recruited by, well one of the key cynical players in this story is the National Association of Manufacturers. They recruit Bernays to help them build a propaganda campaign called the Tripod of Freedom, in which they begin to make this argument that any compromise to business freedom, such as a minimum wage law, or laws to restrict child labour threatens American freedom and the American way of life. So this is a propaganda campaign and they use all the tools of propaganda. They use something which is known as "integration propaganda", where they issue a press release, ostensibly about a news event, but it's really propaganda, and then they get reporters to report on it as if it is a news event. So without having to pay money for advertising, they insert their message into mainstream media. They generate a cartoon campaign that they send to newspapers, it's called Uncle Abner, and it's filled with anti-government, pro-market pro business messages. This is run in thousands of newspapers around the country, and so the ordinary reader has no way of knowing that this is actually propaganda for an industry trade group. And a whole lot more, I mean it's a 500 page book! So I won't go into all the details here. But it's pretty, it's pretty darn cynical. Now, it doesn't mean that everyone involved is 100% cynical. And I think, again, I think we can find people, players in the story who do authentically believe some of these claims or maybe they persuade themselves. I mean, rationalisation is a very powerful force. I think there are business leaders who rationalise what they want to do by claiming, you know, taking on this argument that really suits their purposes. But I think there's an awful lot of cynical behaviour in the story. We've told them the new book.

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah. And it touches on so many things. It's such a large story, including the kind of, the invention, or the beginning of the Chicago School, a group of economists, and the sort of reinterpretation of Adam Smith's treaties, leaving out certain sections where he clearly says, you know, "markets need guardrails." But those sort of go missing in translation when it's brought over. And so, I mean- and then there's a huge, really interesting section there, where they- they're very data driven, right, that they work out that religion is an important piece of what motivates people and in the US context, in particular. So there's this, you know, the creation of a sense in which it's irreligious to be anti-corporate profit, which is quite a thing to pull off, right? But, but it seems to have worked. So it's fascinating, and I highly recommend anyone who is interested in this topic. But Naomi, I want to also just touch on the fact that you've uncovered a lot of really interesting and quite disturbing stories, but you're not like anti-capitalist, right? Your sort of positioning is, "these are a few bad actors, you know, the wolves. The vast majority of business and businesses were and are - many of them - benign, brilliant at bringing wealth and jobs and creating social cohesion. So it's not anti-business and it's not anti-capitalism, right? It's just calling out the propaganda. Am I interpreting your position correctly?

Naomi Oreskes  
I might add a little nuance to it. So basically, yes, I'm not anti-business. I totally agree with what you just said. Lots of businesses produce good products that we like, I mean, you know, this is a nice coffee mug and this is a nice water bottle, and these are good headphones, and I'm using a laptop. So it would be weird and hypocritical in the extreme to say that I was opposed to technology or business in general. And I do agree, I think there are certainly plenty of businesses that obey the law, that seem to be reasonably honest and above-board, and they provide goods and services that people want. This is not a polemic against American business. It's a polemic against, really against propaganda and disinformation. But the question of the future of capitalism, I want to say, I think it's kind of an open question. And we tried to leave it a little open at the end of the book, but mainly to say, what I think is really important - and Erik Conway and I had, you know, there's always like the long conversation you have about how you're going to end a book, because the hardest thing- the second hardest thing is starting and the hardest thing is ending. So there are a lot of people who are now indicting capitalism, saying, you know, "this is all about capitalism, it's the fault of capitalism, we have to get rid of capitalism." That strikes me as a not so helpful position for at least two reasons. Maybe three, I mean, strategically, it's not helpful, because a lot of people just stop listening, so maybe that's the first reason. But also, I mean, the word capitalism is a little bit of a vexed word, because like the state, or religion, capitalism has been many different things throughout its history. And the capitalism that Adam Smith was imagining back in 1776 is extremely different from the industrial-managerial capitalism, that is dominating American culture at the time our story begins, a capitalism that is extremely brutal, in which hundreds of 1000s of people are being injured or killed on the job every year, and in which children as young as two years old are working in textile mills, in Massachusetts. And that's very different from the capitalism we have today, which is globalised, financialized and, right. So the first intervention is to say capitalism isn't one thing. So therefore, we can think about the particular form of capitalism, this highly unregulated version that has denied the external costs that we are living with today and ask- the most obvious question is, can we reform it? And my view is, and we say this in the book, I do think the conservatives are right about a few things. And one of the things I think they're right about is that we shouldn't be too quick to overthrow institutions that have basically worked pretty well for us. And we shouldn't be too quick to, well, you know, revolutions often turn out badly, right? They often go violent. So I don't think we should be quick to somehow think that we should just throw out everything. I don't think that makes sense. I don't think history supports that. So it seems to me, what we should really be talking about is is there a way to reform capitalism, to take better account of the external costs to figure out a way- we thought about having a final chapter, and we were going to call it "true-cost capitalism". And then it just seemed like way too complicated and we'd have every economist in the world killing us! So we just thought, okay, that's a different book. But that's kind of the point, right? Is there a way to reform capitalism? And that seems like the obvious place to start. And it might be that 50 years from now, we decide that we really do need a different economic system. And that's not crazy. We've had- 

Bryony Worthington  
No no no, and, but going back to your first point, which is that capitalism is not a fixed thing. It's aimless democracy, it evolves and it needs tending to. And actually, one of the things that I was interested in thinking about, like, where are we now in this version of capitalism is, as you mentioned, the financialization. And I often now wonder, because there are companies who want to do the right thing, but they're beholdent to this idea that maximising shareholder value. And actually, I wondered if sitting- so you spend a really great amount brilliantly articulating the actors who are carrying out these interventions, this propaganda, and then the companies who are paying them to do this, but then behind those companies, there's another band of people, which are the "wolves of Wall Street", right? So those wolves, maybe it's there, that's where like- now, companies are not able to be as- they think in the long term, or to take more social positions. And, you know, even to the extent we've had to take out a new form of legal entity, like a B Corp, to just say, "actually, it's okay to take wider issues into account." You know, so it is possible to involve capitalism. But I worry about the financialization, because that's all about the short term, it seems to me and, and in banking, you know, has just changed so much over the years to be a completely different thing. So, yeah, I'm pleased that you clarified it. But I do think we're going to- it's the beginning of a conversation about where we go next, right?

Naomi Oreskes  
Exactly. And I really hope that economists and business leaders get involved  in this conversation because you're actually right. I mean, you know, we definitely see companies who are trying to do the right things, adopt ESG policies, you know, we've seen shareholder resolutions on these issues, but, but one of the things that stands in the way of reform is this notion of shareholder value. And, of course, the irony is that people didn't always think that. And that's very much associated with Milton Friedman, who's an important character in this book, and also Jack Welch of GE. GE is an important player in this book. So this was an idea that was put forward in post-World War Two America, that that was the only thing that corporate leader should be focused on. But that doesn't have to be, right, that's not a legal statute, it's not in the 10 Commandments, it's not in Adam Smith. So, it was an argument that people made and was adopted, but we can argue against it, and we could say, "No, that was a big mistake." And in fact, you know, we can show in so many different ways, how it was destructive, but as you said- but as long as Wall Street is making, you know, big decisions about, you know, what companies get bought at what price or what banks are lending, you know, this would be- it's very hard to get away from. And so one of the reasons why we spent - and we spend a lot of time talking about General Electric as a company, mainly because of its role in creating Ronald Reagan as the, you know, the key political figure that he is and has been and remains in American life - but also because so many people were influenced by Jack Welch's later arguments about, you know, downsizing, financialization, shareholder value, to understand that he comes out of a company with a long history of dishonesty, a long history of breaking the law of conspiring to rig electricity markets, even while in public, they're promoting the values of the free market, and union-busting, breaking the law with respect to labour law. So this is not a company with a track record that we should admire. So I mean- and obviously there's a there's a rethinking about Jack Welch going on right now. I mean, it's funny, I read two biographies of Jack Welch that came out after our book was done. And one is fawning and idiographic, and the other is just saying that "Jack Welch destroyed capitalism". So, you know, there's obviously, yes, there's obviously a conversation that needs to happen here about the financialization of capitalism. Because, you know, when Jack Welch was first financializing, in GE, it looked really brilliant. He was making these giant profits and had these amazing, what do you call it, sheets? What's the word? Balance sheets, right, amazing balance sheet showing profits every quarter. You know, now, we know in hindsight that a lot of that was achieved through shenanigans. So that kind of reevaluation of Jack Welch, I think, is really important. And it's part of a larger conversation about how we understand how capitalism should work.

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah. And there's another lovely quote in your book, which basically says, "The invisible hand never picks up the tab".

Naomi Oreskes  
Yeah, that comes from the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, I just love that quotation.

Bryony Worthington  
And it's sort of, really, you know, that is the issue. It's the externalities of being, you know, you can be a successful business and have huge externalities, and if they're not on the ledger, then you know, something's wrong. And I guess this is at the nub of it is like, how do we get to a point where we have a governance structure that can internalise those externalities, and in the face of pretty stiff and well-funded opposition. And that's kind of the climate story really, like, as you say, taking it right back to the start, we've known about the chemistry or the physics of climate change since the 1900s. And it gets firmer and firmer till we get to the 1950s. And then, you know, there's this moment in the 1970s, where it looks like the scientists and the governments are having a moment of just talking to each other and coming up with a plan, but then, of course, you know, the vested interests do wake up. And at that point, suddenly, it all becomes less certain, much more complex in the minds of, of the politicians, at least. And here we are 50 years later, right, and it's currently almost, you know, it's looking pretty bad in terms of, now the impacts of that 50 year hiatus, so but not to be too gloomy about it. I wonder if we could think about-

Naomi Oreskes  
 I think we can be gloomy if we need to be I mean, this is - if I can just interrupt, I mean, I feel like there's this like weird pressure to be happy. And I mean, if the situation is not a happy situation, I feel like we do have to confront that and sit with it. It doesn't mean that I'm saying giving up. I'm not. But if I could just add one thing about what you said a minute ago, because I think was so important, I'd like to underscore. I mean, this is really the central question, the question of the external costs, that I could be a business, I could be an honest business, I'm making shoes, and they're good shoes, and I sell them at a fair price. But, you know, if my carbon pollution is changing the climate, and that's causing billions of dollars in damage, maybe trillions every year, that's a problem. And right now, the way we operate, our economy doesn't account for that. And so, you know, one thing that I would really like to see, I mean, sometimes people ask, you know, what's my hope for my book? I mean, I would really like it if this would inspire a generation of young economists. This should really be the central question of economics in my mind right now, right here, because if we don't fix this, then we are either going to look at a true climate catastrophe, as we wrote about in the collapse of Western civilization, that was a thought experiment that I didn't think I really had to worry about seriously, and now I do. But it should really be the central question of economics and governance. Because if we can't fix that, then we're going to be looking at climate crisis and that climate crisis is going to, in my opinion, undermine democracy. I think in some parts of the world it maybe already is,.

Bryony Worthington  
Well, so I had- one question I thought I would ask, but I didn't want to get too gloomy which is, you know, when the waves of climate change are really crashing against the structures of modern society, what happens? Do we wake up and say, "we need more governance, we need better governance, we need more talent focused on these questions," or does it just start to crumble away and what we have get even less capable like skeletal and its ability to act? And we all can become very inward-focused on a kind of personal individualised security question. And both can be true probably at the same time that you know, where are you on that kind of spectrum of optimism versus pessimism?

Naomi Oreskes  
Well, you know the old saying, "an optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears that it is." Yeah, well that's why we wrote The Collapse of Western Civilization. So that was the book we wrote after Merchants of Doubt. It's a small book, a kind of novella. And it really was meant to be a kind of thought experiment to answer exactly this question. So what happens if the forces of denial when and we fail to act on the climate crisis? And I think it's bad. I think that you don't need to know a lot about history to realise that a climate crisis will lead to a political and social crisis. And just think about even in our own lifetimes, times when there have been food shortages, food shortages can lead to food riots, which can destabilise governments, and then things get bad fast. We saw this even during the pandemic, where we saw people distrust in governmental functions rising at a very moment that you might have thought people would rally together and say, "we're in this together, let's fix it," no, we saw a lot of people, you know, stockpiling weaponry. So I think it's very frightening. And it doesn't mean it has to go that way. Obviously, we wrote that book, in part, because we don't think it has to go that way, right? I mean, if you write a book, there's some great deep optimism involved in writing a book because you wouldn't spend five years of your life doing all this research, breathing dusty air in archives, if you didn't believe that writing the book had the potential to change- yeah to make a difference, that by making people aware of an issue, they would maybe do something more about it. And so that's the optimistic part, right?

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah. And exactly. And, you know, one thing I've seen in the time that I've been engaged on climate change is, you know, for me, the optimism comes from the fact that the sheer number of people now who are devoting their time and attention to making a difference, bringing about this transition, you know, my sense is that we will see the back of the fossil fuel era, because there are going to be way better technologies that come to market pretty fast. And because we have this capitalist system, you know, they are able to scale, they're able to move now into manufacturing and get products out in front of people very quickly. And it's- we're just at the cusp of that. So there's- but I guess, the question is, are we moving fast enough? And have the companies that enter the sort of the pro climate action companies? Have they got a similar playbook? Are they kind of getting engaged in the narrative? Or are they- what I see is a lot of individual companies successfully getting interventions from government. Despite the best efforts of the wolves,  we are seeing policies passed, we are seeing technologies come down the cost curve, but it's quite sort of piecemeal. And there isn't like a cultural shift happening, where we're all saying the same thing to our leaders to say "we want more of this," it seems quite like, "I want this subsidy or this policy in this region." We need perhaps a big cultural shift that these new actors could perhaps bring about if they were better-coordinated.

Naomi Oreskes  
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think part of the problem is what we're seeing now, it is a mixed landscape. There's definitely good news on the technology front for sure. The way the price of wind and solar have come down rapidly. I think we're seeing advances in energy storage. Electric cars are great, right? I mean, they're fun to drive, they're good cars, they're super, you know, so much more efficient, they don't parts- don't have as many parts to break. But we're also seeing opposition to electric cars from you know- this is changing, but until really recently, the big manufacturers were resisting them, in part, because the dealers make most of their profit off parts and repair. So if you don't have repairs, then the dealers aren't going to make the profits that they want. And we're seeing a similar thing in the wind space. There's a whole big false narrative coming up about how wind power kills whales. We know that these are front groups, in part because these are people who have never cared about whales before. We have 50 years of whale conservation in this country, and all of a sudden, these groups are worried about how wind power will affect whales! And they're not cetacean biologists. And we, I mean, I have good colleagues at Brown who are tracking this. These are definitely front organisations. So the forces of resistance and disinformation are still there, for sure. But the biggest problem, I think, is what I would call the "all-of-the-above mentality." This was the official policy under Obama, this so-called "all-of-the-above" energy policy. And when Joe Biden was on the campaign trail, he said that his climate policy was going to be the same as Obama. And that is actually kind of what he's done. And an "all-of-the-above" policy is not a climate policy. It's an energy policy, but it's not a climate policy. And so what we've seen in the United States - I just got back from North Dakota, which is a case in point. So 30% of the energy being produced in North Dakota now is wind, it goes over the grid to Minnesota, which has a renewable portfolio standard. So there's a good example of how policy can help support technology. But it's not instead of fossil fuels, it's in addition, and that's what we're seeing across the United States today. And the end, the proof of the pudding is what's happening to the atmosphere. So yes, we're seeing big improvements in renewable energy, more efficient cars, but CO2 in the atmosphere is still rising. And at the end of the day, that atmosphere doesn't care what we're doing on the ground, the only thing that is going to make a difference to the climate system is to get those CO2 levels under control. And that has still not happened.

Bryony Worthington  
Well, I mean, that is really interesting. And it's something that a lot of the guests on this podcast- you know, Michael, whose podcast I'm guest-hosting has been brilliant at calling out when something's been proposed as a solution, but actually is really a kind of either a false solution, or it's basically helping to prolong the status quo so that we get this all-of-the-above moving forward. And it creates confusion and a lack of understanding amongst politicians about what the true answer is. And Michael uncovered a really interesting example in the UK, where a group called the Energy Utilities Association was pushing hard for hydrogen into home heating. And anyone who's looked at the physics or the economics of that, or even the safety of it, would say that that's a really bad idea. But it's well-funded, it helps prolong the status quo, it's a way of shoring up your investor confidence. And so it is all happening still, to this day, you know, this confusion, the sowing of doubt, or the false solutions. But there are so many - now - ways in which you can find out information. I mean, one thing that was lovely was working with a local community in the UK that was being asked to take 100% home-heating hydrogen trial, because we have the technology to be able to find out anything you want from anyone really, they armed themselves, they got themselves very well-informed, and they pushed back and they stopped it from from going ahead. Yeah, so that's information. 

Naomi Oreskes  
That's a nice story.

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, that's a good story. But, so coming back to this cultural shift then, you know, as you say, you wrote a book, because books are cultural moments, there was a film made. But there seems to be so many other media now that are used to sell messages. In countering this different disinformation- I think there's been a lot of analysing of the problem. I've seen lots of reports, you know, looking at disinformation, but who- are you connected to or are other groups that you know that are trying to fight back? And just, you know, use the tools back in the other direction? 

Yeah, definitely, I mean for sure. I mean, getting back to what you were saying before, about, you know, the energy landscape, I mean, I think a lot of what's going on in the United States right now is carrots, but not sticks. So we have tax credits and incentives for renewable energy for a whole bunch of things, some of which are better than others. But these are all essentially characterised to incentivize the private sector to move in the direction of renewable energy. And that's good. And I'm all in favour of carrots. But I think that both the urgency of the problem and history shows that you need sticks as well. And particularly need sticks when you're dealing with bad faith actors, which we know we are here. And so my concern is that without both the sticks and the carrots, we will just get more energy, but we won't get a climate solution. Yeah, so I just wanted to add that piece of the discussion. Oh sorry, but then the question- the question was, who am I working with? Right. So the reason why I say that- so one effective stick that we have in society is the law,  and we have legal redress. And so I am involved with groups that have been looking for a while - I mean, this is not a secret - ExxonMobil makes a big fuss about it. They think I'm incredibly powerful, which is a giant compliment. So I take the compliment, even though I think they exaggerate my efficacy. So I've been involved since about 2011 with a group of scientists, lawyers, legal scholars and activists to think about how the law can be mobilised to protect the American people against disinformation and other related things. And so here in Massachusetts, the Attorney General has filed suit against Exxon Mobil for violation of consumer protection laws. State of California has just recently said that they're going to be- that they're filing suit. And in Oregon, Multnomah County, the county in which Portland, Oregon is located, they are filing suit for deaths related to the Portland Heat Dome, which scientists have said in peer-reviewed detection and attribution studies, would have been virtually impossible to have occurred without climate change. So these are all- I'm not at liberty to say exactly which cases I'm involved in or what my role is, and I'm also - here's something that is public - and I am also an expert witness in Mike Mann's defamation case against the Competitive Enterprise Institute for having defamed him for the work he did as a scientist. So I do work to stand up for scientists. I'm a member of the Climate Science Legal Defence Fund, I work with groups that defend scientists, that defend the integrity of scientific knowledge. And I'm also working with groups that are trying to apply legally appropriate sticks to people who we think may have broken the law.

Yeah, no, I think it's a real experiment that's going on at the moment, right, where the US is doing what it's best at, which is kind of tax breaks and incentives and then, you know, you've got China doing a planned economy completely different. And then in Europe, we're sort of a mixture, we've got some sticks, we got some carrots, mostly sticks, but each bloc, you know, is making moves forward. It's just how do we scale it and happen the fastest, and I'm kind of hoping that a kind of competitiveness breaks through that makes everyone want to catch up, because ultimately, it's going to be cheaper and better to have an economy that's more efficient and running on clean electrons than carting fossil fuels around the planet, which is deeply inefficient.

Absolutely, and I do think that's one of the ironies. And, you know, sometimes people will ask me, "Well, what's the cost of delay?" And I think, you know, this is one example, if we had moved promptly on, you know, incentives for renewable energy back in 1992, when President George HW Bush signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, we could have developed a whole solar panel industry in this country, and we could be beating the pants off China, in that market. But we didn't. Instead, we really ceded that market to China. And then, you know, I mean, it's so hypocritical when climate change deniers say 'well but what about China?" You know, it's like, "yeah what about China, we could have been beating the pants off them, but you stop that, you persuaded the American people, we didn't need to do anything. And meanwhile, they built this giant solar panel industry. And those could have been good jobs right here in the United States." And there are multiple examples like that, right? But the other thing that's important about what you just said, it's also a good example of how there's no one-size-fits-all solution. I often get asked, "well, what's the answer?" But as you said, depending upon the cultural and political situation, the answer is going to be different. And it may well be that China mobilises its planned economy. And maybe that ends up being a good thing for them, even though that would never work as a solution here in the United States.

Yeah, no, it definitely feels like that- the sort of history of humanity is that we experiment with different approaches, culturally, you know, relevant to our own background. And we're doing that now and so it's not a surprise. I mean, I guess for me, the hope comes from the fact that ultimately, we've got a globalised society, you know, like in the 50s, had we tried to solve climate change, then, there would have been impediments, that perhaps we've now got a much more- communication channels that are much faster, there's more trust, I think, maybe in investing into different jurisdictions. Perhaps I'm being- but it feels like the last 20 years of building a more cohesive global community, in some ways, is now something we've got, you know, even just the computing power that we now have, which we didn't have before. It's sort of, yeah, we still need a time machine. I mean, don't get me wrong, you know, I still think we're late. And actually, we need to go back in time and make good on the last 50 years. And I suppose that to bring it back to your point about the legal redress, I wonder if that's not at a global level also going to become an emergent story, right? 

Naomi Oreskes  
Well it already is, I mean, there was a big case against shell in the Netherlands, there's another big case going on in the Philippines. I mean, we're seeing attempts at legal redress. There's a case pending at the International Court of Justice. So I do think we will see more of this, especially as the damages become more evident and more provable. I mean, one area where there has been a big scientific advance is in what scientists call detection and attribution, being able to say, "yes, this particular event, either would have been impossible or virtually impossible or very unlikely without climate change." 10 years ago, there were very few scientists who felt they could say that about very many events. Now, we have a lot of scientists who are willing- who think they can say that scientifically. And I think that changes the legal landscape, because then you're able to say, "well, here are the damages from this event, this event almost certainly would not have occurred without climate change. Therefore, you know, the drivers of climate change, the people who knowingly sold these products and lied about it-" because that's the fraud part of this, right? You know, if they hadn't lied about it, then the legal context would be a little murkier, although, you know, there still could be a case for damages. I mean, if you do something that hurts another person, even if you didn't lie about it, you can still be held responsible. So we are definitely seeing that. I want to slightly burst your bubble on the communication thing, because I was just talking to some colleagues about this just the other day. You know, one of things about history is that there are no constants, because history is an evolving, you know, pageantry, right, as the saying goes. But one thing that is really consistent, at least, you know, in the last 150 years ago, is that people always think that communication is going to solve our problem. So back in the 1920s, there was all this great rhetoric about how radio- the radio was going to end war, because we'd be able to communicate, and we'd come to understand each other. Yeah, well that didn't exactly happen. And then television was going to bring the American people together, the Internet was going to make everything more democratic, because we would vote from our, you know, our laptops and stuff. So yeah, I mean, I don't want to say communication isn't good. Of course it is good. But I think we often- we expect too much from technology. And the bottom line is, technology doesn't change us as people. And if we don't figure out a way, like, as you said earlier, if we don't figure out a way to reach people's hearts, we can have the best technology in the world and we'd still be back where we started. So it's got to be some kind of combination of harnessing technology, but also harnessing people's hearts and minds.

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah. Which brings me to my kind of closing question, really, which is, in a sense, you know, going right the way back, you know, you talked about Bernays and his advertising insights and psychology and in working out how to motivate people. And I'm part of a group of people who are coming out of the advertising industry. And using all of the talents and insights that they have to try and think about how do we create this big cultural transformation; the technology is one thing, but then how do you get people to adopt and adapt to having these technologies in their lives? And what's been interesting, as the testing has been done, there is a concept that lifts people's support for these things, that beats any sense of, you know, like, freedom or fear. And it's not hope or clean jobs, it's love, which is amazing. And it's love for your children, love for your home and the security of your home, love for life, like love for nature, and the fact that- and this feeling of loss, that we might be moving into a situation where we have kind of irreversible losses, and that's a motivator. So, you know, the talent that we have, to move people and get people- move hearts and minds, could be starting to be deployed. And we might see the merchants of love emerging, which I would love to see.

Naomi Oreskes  
I love that. No, totally. I mean, actually, it's very interesting. I wrote a paper years ago, about the national parks. If you look at where Americans go on vacation, one of the most popular destinations is national parks. And if you ask people, why did they go there? Or why do they go camping? Why do people spend time in the wilderness, on camping trips in state forest? It's because they love being outside, they love nature, right? So I think humans are deeply motivated by love, I think far more than greed, actually, or even self-interest. I mean, think about all the things parents do for their children, all the things we do for our neighbours, for our parents, our elders. I mean, this is all about love and compassion. I feel like one of the truly noxious things that the merchants of doubt and others have done is to try to persuade us that we are fundamentally bad at heart, that we're motivated by greed and self interest. Well, yes, those things are real, they definitely exist. But people are also motivated by love, by compassion, by empathy, fellow-feeling. It's all there. And so one of the questions that I always have, I think we should all have front and center is, what are the conditions that bring out, you know, as Abraham Lincoln put it, the better angels of our nature? I've thought about a follow up book - I really try hard to discipline myself and not get ahead of myself, but I can't help myself. I'm thinking about a book and the title would be - and I better like tell my agent this right away so someone else doesn't steal it. But, Capitalism is Not in our Genes, right? Sometimes when I've been on planes and I start a conversation, especially if I get an upgrade to business class, you know, with the businessman next to me - it's usually a man, and this is gendered too, because that's important to recognise - they will tell me that the reason why socialism failed was because humans are naturally competitive and therefore that capitalism harnesses our natural competitive instincts. Well, that's partly true. We do have natural competitive instincts and capitalism does harness them. But we also have naturally cooperative instincts. And if you look at nature, I mean, this is one thing that makes me most angry about the misrepresentation of Darwin. And I could- we could do a whole other hour on that, right? But, I mean, Darwin's descriptions of what he calls "the contrivances of adaptations" are filled with discussions of symbiosis, of mutualism. Anyone who's ever snorkelled or gone scuba-diving and looked at a reef; reefs are explosions of cooperation. I mean, one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my life, and I've been fortunate enough to travel a lot and see a lot of amazing things, is the cleaner fish on the reef - this was featured in the film Finding Nemo - and the fish lineup to get cleaned. I mean, how do they do that? These fish have brains the size of acorns, and yet somehow, they know that if they wait their turn, these cleaner fish will pick off the bad parasites, and everybody will be happy, because the cleaner fish get to eat, and they get these parasites removed! This is this unbelievable expression of cooperation in nature. And if the fish can do it, then surely we with our giant brains ought to be able to do it, too!

Bryony Worthington  
So we're going to end this here. But thank you so much, I'm sure we could have actually gone on for another hour. And we talked about how, you know, the nature of humankind and how kindness is part of humankind. So, but let's leave it here, and thank you so much for your time. Do let us know when you start your next project. But it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me, and I look forward our paths crossing again.

Naomi Oreskes  
Likewise, it's been a pleasure. It's been a great conversation.

Bryony Worthington  
So that was Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes. You can find links to the articles and the books that we mentioned in today's conversation in the shownotes, including the three fascinating books that she's co authored with Erik Conway, The Merchants of Doubt, The Collapse of Western Civilization, and her latest book, The Big Myth. I've also included a link to the DeSmog article that we mentioned, which uncovers the hydrogen industry's attempts to cast out on heat pumps. So this disinformation continues even to this day. Thanks very much for listening, and I'm now welcoming back Michael.

Michael Liebreich  
Bryony, that was absolutely fascinating. What an incredible thought leader Professor Oreskes has been. I hope you enjoyed your first go in the hot seat as guest host of Cleaning Up!

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, absolutely. I found that a fascinating conversation too and I've really enjoyed it. It is though, however, a little bit harder than you make it look. But I'm glad to have got my first one under my belt!

Michael Liebreich  
Well, you did absolutely great. And I can't wait to listen to your next few conversations as guest host, it's going to be a fascinating ride! 

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it too. 

Michael Liebreich  
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