Manufactured doubt is the replicable engine of science denial.

Evidence

The scientific debate remains open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming. 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 debates. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 626 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Each component of the neoliberal response is firmly grounded in neoliberal economic doctrine, and as such, has its own special function to perform. As we have already learned from historians of the tobacco strategy such as Richard Proctor and historians of climate denialism such as Naomi Oreskes, the purpose of science denialism has been to quash all immediate impulses to respond to the perceived biosphere crisis, and to buy time for commercial interests to construct some other eventual market solutions to global warming. Denying the very existence of global warming is cheap and easy to propagate, can be fostered quickly, and tends to draw attention away from issues of appropriate responses to crisis. The neoliberal think tanks behind the denial of climate change don’t seriously believe they are going to win the war of ideas within academic science in the long run, just as the tobacco strategy never envisioned disproving the smoking-cancer link. Yet, nevertheless, even the existing denial of the science displays its neoliberal bona fides. The first response to a political challenge should always be epistemological, in the sense that the marketplace of ideas has to be seeded with doubt and confusion. This is the core of the agnotological project. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 927 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

The unappreciated lesson is that the product being manufactured was doubt, not cigarettes — and doubt is cheap, durable, and legal. The same personnel and the same playbook later resurfaced around acid rain, the ozone layer, and climate change. The tobacco files are less a story about smoking than a blueprint for how an industry can hold off settled science for forty years. — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 788 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Tobacco’s deceit paid so well that a $200 billion settlement still turned profit.; Corporate science denial was born when tobacco firms funded fake research.; Science denial pioneered tactics now applied across all factual reality (+10 more)

Related

• Climate denial trades on manufactured doubt, not persuasion of scientists (similarity 0.92)
• Tobacco’s manufactured doubt predated and enabled climate denial playbooks (similarity 0.88)
• Think tanks deliberately manufacture public doubt about settled science to shape policy (similarity 0.88)
• Science denial pioneered tactics now applied across all factual reality (similarity 0.88)
• Corporations manufacture doubt as a deliberate product to block climate action (similarity 0.87)
• Manufactured scientific doubt was the proving ground for today’s wholesale rejection of truth. (similarity 0.87)
• The tobacco industry’s manufactured-doubt playbook became a template for all later science denial. (similarity 0.87)
• Manufactured doubt, not genuine debate, explains public confusion over climate science consensus (similarity 0.87)
• Seeding doubt about settled science effectively confuses the public (similarity 0.84)
• Manufactured doubt need not be consciously willed to paralyze economic reform (similarity 0.82)
• The tobacco industry manufactured public doubt as its primary defense strategy (similarity 0.82)
• Science denial trained today’s politicians to deny any inconvenient facts. (similarity 0.81)
• Manufacturing public doubt about evidence is a deliberate corporate strategy for harm denial (similarity 0.81)
• The tobacco industry invented science denial as public-relations strategy (similarity 0.80)
• The fossil fuel industry replicated the tobacco denial playbook (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Think tanks deliberately manufacture public doubt about settled science to shape policy #corroborates (0.95) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 626
• Climate denial trades on manufactured doubt, not persuasion of scientists #exemplifies (0.92) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 927
• Tobacco’s manufactured doubt predated and enabled climate denial playbooks #expands (0.90) — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 788
• Manufactured doubt deployed by agnotologists also operates inside economics #expands (0.88) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 669
• Industry disinformation demanded impossible certainty regardless of accumulated evidence #corroborates (0.85) — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age, 94
• Manufactured doubt need not be consciously willed to paralyze economic reform #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 670