On this subject, some Republicans are Cynics, some are Believers, and many combine bits of both. The pure Cynics are doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, which has cynically and successfully raised doubts about the clear scientific consensus on the cause of global warming. In this, they repeated what the tobacco industry had pioneered starting in the 1960s, as soon as medical science established that smoking causes cancer. At the Brown & Williamson cigarette company in 1969, an internal memo was explicit. “Doubt is our product,” it declared, “the best means of competing with the
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