I have just finished a draft of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Merchants, set for June publication, is one helluva good book. The authors' central thesis should please right-wing sloganeers: "No, Virginia, there is no free lunch." But there is -- as the authors document extensively -- a collaboration determined to sabotage proper and necessary government regulation and send us the bill. It involves a small cadre of ideologues dressed as scientists, bankrolled by profit-first corporate interests, working through dozens of front groups. Unfortunately, that collaboration has been all too successful. So why do so many in the public swallow the baloney? One reason is that scientists are bad at explaining things to non-scientists. Merchants of Doubt explains:

"Scientists are finely honed specialists trained to create new knowledge, but they have little training in how to communicate to broad audiences, even less in how to defend scientific work against determined and well-financed contrarians. They often have little talent or taste for it, either."

They are too confident that all they need do is present the facts, and the public will get it. Most of them avoid advocating in public for fear of being accused of being "political." Besides that--they're awful busy doing science. Newsweek columnist Sharon Begley (Mar. 29) gives us an even more obvious reason for the success of propaganda. The general public is woefully ignorant. Begley writes:

"It's a safe bet that the millions of Americans who have recently changed their minds about global warming...deciding it isn't happening or isn't due to human activities such as burning coal and oil, or isn't a serious threat didn't just spend a few days poring over climate change studies..."

So who has misled them and why? Oreskes and Conway help us to understand. In addition to the corporate-funded "non-profit" think tanks which are not required to -- and often do not -- reveal their funding sources, there are those few scientists whose political ideology clearly cancels their objectivity. Most are called out in the book. One of many examples is Frederick Seitz. Seitz worked for R.J. Reynolds and the tobacco industry to deny and cast doubts on the evidence of the health hazards of smoking. But he didn't stop there. Seitz most recently played a key role in the bogus Oregon Petition Project, which still claims that over 31,000 scientists don't believe in man-caused global warming. But follow-up investigations found very few to be climate scientists or even scientists of any kind, according to sourcewatch.com. Seitz was a co-founder of the George C. Marshall Institute, currently a key player in global warming denial. George Marshall receives funding from Exxon-Mobil and American Standard, The staff includes a Koch Foundation Associate. We have previously noted denial propagandist Walter E. Williams' ties to Koch Industries and Americans For Prosperity, now sponsoring denial side shows.

"It was all of a piece," write Oreskes and Conway. "If you believed in [unregulated] capitalism, you had to attack science, because science had revealed the hazards that capitalism had brought in its wake. The biggest hazard of them all— one that could truly affect the entire planet— was just at that moment coming to public attention: global warming. Global warming would become the mother of all environmental issues, because it struck at the very root of economic activity: the use of energy."

The media has not really done its job, the authors charge:

"Most people don’t understand this. If we read an article in the newspaper presenting two opposing viewpoints, we assume both have validity, and we think it would be wrong to shut one side down.... 'Balance' had become a form of bias, whereby the media coverage was biased in favor of minority -- in some cases extreme minority -- views.... As we have seen, it wasn’t just obviously right- wing outlets that reported false claims about tobacco and these other subjects; it was the 'prestige press' — indeed, the allegedly liberal press — as well. Maybe now the tide is starting to turn."

Let's hope so. Unrestricted capitalism has its costs because.... No, Virginia, there is no such thing as a free lunch.