Corporations manufacture doubt as a deliberate product to block climate action

Evidence

Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.” Or, to cite another memo: “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. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.” Controversy, in turn, plays into the media’s standard for-and-against formula for debate, even if that binary skews the consensus radically; even if, as in the case of anthropogenic climate change, 3,000 climate scientists confirm that it is happening and none deny it. The against position thus typically devolves to a right-wing activist with no peer-reviewed climate change publications. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 108

Categorization

• SEED: The Luntz and tobacco memos are quotable primary evidence for an essay on how manufactured uncertainty, not just scientific controversy, sustains environmental inaction.
• XREF: Connects directly to the ‘culture of doubt’ literature (Oreskes and Conway’s Merchants of Doubt) named in the following paragraph; also pairs with corporate ‘self-healing’ rhetoric flagged in chapter 5. — connects to: Tobacco’s manufactured doubt predated and enabled climate denial playbooks — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive: The Complete…, 788; Manufacturing public doubt about evidence is a deliberate corporate strategy for harm denial — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1658; Climate denial trades on manufactured doubt, not persuasion of scientists — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 927 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Tobacco’s manufactured doubt predated and enabled climate denial playbooks #corroborates (0.95) — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 788
• Manufacturing public doubt about evidence is a deliberate corporate strategy for harm denial #corroborates (0.90) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1658
• The fossil fuel industry replicated the tobacco denial playbook #corroborates (0.90) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 246
• Think tanks deliberately manufacture public doubt about settled science to shape policy #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 626
• Climate denial trades on manufactured doubt, not persuasion of scientists #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 927
• Climate-denial think tanks manufactured the invented ‘climate lockdowns’ threat #exemplifies (0.80) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 486