From Secondhand Smoke to Global Warming

In theory, a think tank is a non-profit organization which provides expertise of some kind to organizations which don't have this expertise themselves. In the 1970s and '80s, however, something changed: think tanks, instead of selling knowledge and expertise, began selling ignorance and uncertainty. A 1969 document from the Brown and Williamson tobacco company which was recently made public admirably sums up the purpose of today's think tanks:

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of
fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. . . . Within the business we recognize that a controversy exists. However, with the general public the consensus is that cigarettes are in some way harmful to the health. If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts [!] about smoking and health (pp. 3-4).

To see how doubt can work as a commodity, one has only to look at the recent history of the tobacco companies. In the 1980s, the EPA and other groups began to notice a pattern which suggested that secondhand smoke could be almost as dangerous as smoking oneself. As it had done throughout the '60s and '70s with regard to the health risks of smoking, the tobacco industry decided to muddy the waters, to "[establish] a controversy at the public level."

The tobacco companies, particularly Philip Morris, did this with help from a think tank named The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) which was launched in 1994. According to a memo from the PR firm which acted as a liaison between Philip Morris and TASSC, the purpose of TASSC was to "link the tobacco issue with other more 'politically correct' products. . . . The credibility of the EPA is defeatable, but not on the basis of ETS [environmental tobacco smoke] alone. It must be part of a larger mosaic that concentrates all of the EPA's enemies against it at one time." In other words, by linking the EPA's studies on secondhand smoke to less popular environmental causes--global warming, dioxin, pesticides, and so on--Philip Morris hoped to use TASSC to cast doubt on the EPA (see Chris Mooney's book The Republican War on Science, pp. 67-69, 83). Of course, it didn't hurt that TASSC also got funding from Exxon, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, General Motors, 3M, Dow Chemical. . . .

Luckily, as we now know, TASSC failed utterly. The think tank itself is defunct, and Philip Morris ended up paying through the nose for its revolting behavior.

Of course, though the TASSC nightmare is over, think tanks which do the same sort of work are all around us. Just check out this appalling advocacy ad (titled "Energy") released by the petroleum-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, which ends with the line: "Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution. We call it. . . life" (see this story from Reuters for background. See Media Transparency , Exxonsecrets.org, and Source Watch for more on where the Competitive Enterprise Institute gets its funding). And then there is the 1998 internal memo from the American Petroleum Institute discussing ways to weaken public support of the Kyoto Protocol. According to this memo, it is essenial to get "average citizens [to] 'understand' (recognize) uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the 'conventional wisdom'" (p. 4). The memo also calls for the recruitment and training of "a team of five independent scientists who do not have a long history of visibility and/or participation in the climate change debate. Rather, this team will consist of new faces who will add their voices to those recognized scientists who are already vocal" (p. 5). As Chris Mooney notes, "this seems to signal an awareness that after a time, journalists catch on to the connections between contrarian scientists and industry" (82). Naturally, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute denies that the policy suggestions for this memo were ever actually put into practice.

Naturally.

And did I say that the TASSC nightmare is over? What a lie that was! After all, Steven Milloy, once an executive director for TASSC, was one of the people who drafted the 1998 petroleum memo. He now writes a column for FOX News in which he regularly mangles the science about global warming and environmental toxins, as well as arguing that Chernobyl was really no big deal, just like our good buddy John Stossel.

Milloy, once an "adjunct scholar" at the Cato Institute, now has his own think tanks: he is the director for the Free Enterprise Education Institute, which received $80,000 from the ExxonMobil Foundation in 2004 and 2005 and which regularly lambasts corporations and countries which take global warming seriously and work to prevent it.

More famously, Milloy also founded JunkScience.com, which engages in the same antiscientific hokum that TASSC was known for. Milloy has actually founded and operated a string of fly-by-night think tanks of this sort: for example, JunkScience was for a while in 1999 sponsored by "Citizens for Integrity in Science." This organization's address was the same as that of TASSC--1155 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 300 in Washington, DC. The TASSC nightmare is still going on in spades.

The same delightful people who tried to hush up the dangers of secondhand smoke are now working to hush up the dangers of global warming and environmental toxins, and from the same address. Let's hope that TASSC II suffers from the same fate as its repulsive predecessor.

Though I'm not holding my breath.