P. Kirby’s Reviews > Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming > Status Update

Free market fundamentalists can perhaps hold to their views because often they have very little direct experience in commerce or industry. The men in our story all made their careers in programs and institutions that were either directly created by the federal government or largely funded by it. Honestly? This give these people too much credit. Mostly, they are/were selfish gits.

The basic tenet of laissez-faire, that "free" and competitive markets bring supply and demand into equilibrium and thereby ensure the best allocation of resources," is an axiom that turns out not to be true. Prices can be displaced from their "equilibrium ideal" for long periods of time, as any American impacted by the ongoing housing market collapse can attest.

"Balance" had become a form of bias, whereby the media coverage was biased in favor of minority--in some cases extreme minority--views. More like crackpot views.

A third of all Americans thinks that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks on September 11. Nearly a quarter still think that there's no solid evidence that smoking kills. And as recently as 2007, 40 percent of Americans believe that scientific experts were still arguing about the reality of global warming. They're not, but the media would have you believe there is a big controversy.

Lately science has shown us that contemporary industrial civilization is not sustainable. Maintaining our standard of living will require finding new ways to produce our energy and less ecologically damaging ways to produce our food. Science has shown us that Rachel Carson was not wrong.

...for if science is about studying the world as it actually is--rather than as we wish it to be--then science will always have the potential to unsettle the status quo.

Sri Lanka didn't stop using DDT because of what the United States did, or for any other reason. DDT stopped working, but they kept using it anyway. We can surmise why: since DDt had appeared to work at first, officials were reluctant to give it up, even as malaria became resurgent. It took a long time for people to admit defeat--to accept that tiny mosquitoes were in their own way stronger than us.

By the 1930s mosquito control districts throughout the nation had largely brought malaria under control by drainage, removal of breeding sites, and pesticides other than DDT. Malaria infection in Florida, for example, declined every year after 1935, even though DDT was yet to be introduced.

This fascinating, but depressing. Same old pattern over and over. Science provides irrefutable evidence that an industry is making people sick or destroying the planet, and Republicans and their big money interests immediately dominate the narrative with lies and distortion, aided and abetted by the idiot media.

As for migration, "does the Committee really believer that the United States or Western Europe or Canada would accept the huge influx of refugees from poor countries that have suffered a drastic shift in rainfall pattern?" Weinberg demanded. Exactly. Look at how many so-called compassionate conservatives are shitting in the Depends undergarments and taking up arms against Central American refugees.