Doubt Is Our Product

One of my American friends told me that when she went to school the detection of propaganda was taught in American schools. (she's about my age so that would be the 1950-60s) Nowadays, it seems, kids are more likely to be on the receiving end of propaganda in the classroom than being taught to recognise it.


A typical Public Relations/Propaganda (there's no meaningful distinction) technique is to scatter doubt on evidence. People are more ready to accept propaganda when it allows them a clear conscience to carry on doing what they are doing.  A classic example, used by the tobacco industry, was to challenge the medical evidence against smoking by scattering an element of doubt on the very strong evidence.

From, Tobacco Industry Tactics for Resisting Public Policy on Health - issued by the World Health Organization. 

http://www.scielosp.org/pdf/bwho/v78n7/v78n7a07.pdf

‘‘Doubt is our product,’’ proclaimed an internal tobacco industry document in 1969. ‘‘Spread doubt over strong scientific evidence and the public won’t know what to believe.’’

  In April 1970 an internal memorandum in Gallaher Limited, a British tobacco company, commenting on studies conducted on dogs that developed cancer after being exposed to tobacco smoke, reported: ‘Auerbach’s work proves beyond all reasonable doubt the causation of lung cancer by smoke’’ Yet the following advertising copy was developed for the Williamson Tobacco corporation. ‘‘Ten years ago there was a cancer scare over the wax in milk cartons. And over using iodine to get a suntan. These theories were about as valid as the one that says toads cause warts. And they’re about as valid as today’s scare tactics surrounding cigarettes. Because no one has been able to produce conclusive proof that cigarette smoking causes cancer. Scientific, biological, clinical, or any other kind.’’

Such a position wouldn't get very far today but much the same strategy, and rhetoric, is seen in the ongoing climate change debate. Although the scientific and emphirical evidence is strong,  climate change stories are, in such newspapers as the Daily Mail and the Telegraph dismissed as scare stories and the evidence ignored or obfuscated.

Frank Luntz said. “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.”
According to the  (British) Geological society, “Atmospheric CO2 is currently at a level of 390 ppm. It has increased by one third in the last 200 years. One half of that increase has happened in the last 30 years. This level and rate of increase are unprecedented when compared with the range of CO2 in air bubbles locked in the ice cores (170-300 ppm).”

http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/climatechange 


The ice-core records are a record of historical atmosphere quality with some of the oldest records going back 800,000 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core)

The connection between rising temperatures and greenhouse gasses, of which CO2 is one, is not a matter of debate. The sceptics sidestep the issue with the response that CO2 is not a pollutant. It isn't but that's not the matter at issue. The point is that as a greenhouse gas and an atmosphere warming component, it is increasing.


The Heartland Institute is a Think-Tank specialising in generating climate change denier PR and some of their tactics were recently outed by Peter Gleick.

Gleick has contrived to bring a number of very interesting documents into the public domain. These expose the Heartlands agenda, strategy and financial supporters. 
See Heartland Institute 2012 Fundraising Plan


The following discusses how Heartland hope to disseminate doubt regarding climate change science into American schools.
"Dr. David Wojick has presented Heartland a proposal to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools that appears to have great potential for success. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science.
Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy”), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”). 

Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather”), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.
We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $5,000 per module, about $25,000 a quarter, starting in the second quarter of 2012, for this work. The Anonymous Donor has pledged the first $100,000 for this project, and we will circulate a proposal to match and then expand upon that investment."


The amount of money being thrown around is no surprise. Heartland sponsors include the Koch brothers,  David Koch has a net worth, according to wiki, of $25 Billion. 
Koch Industries  Koch Industries have a huge interest, since daddy Fred Koch founded the company, in hydrocarbon products. 


The Kochs (no pun intended) environmental safety record is diabolical and their turnover huge. (2009 revenue, $100 Billion) And, it seems, they've commissioned the help of Heartland Institute to keep it that way

1948. A Choice of Futures

Fans of speculative fiction will be familiar with the concept of alternative futures, where a change in the past creates a different present to the one we know.  In 1948 George Kennan wrote a paper, then classified Top Secret,which looked at the world of the time and mapped out the dangers and options for what was then the newly established 'Empire of the USA'.

Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American adviser, diplomat, political scientist and historian.  He served as deputy head of the U.S. mission in Moscow until April 1946. And between April 1947 and December 1948,  Kennan was an advisor to George C Marshall, Secretary of State. Kennan is regarded as the architect of the Marshal plan, the post war financial support that countries in Europe received in the post war period. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan

At the time the USA was at the top of its game, with a supercharged industry and the sole possessor of the nuclear weapons that had cost it plenty to produce but would be, until 1949, be its sole privilege. As Kennan writes, the USA had 50% of the world's wealth and 6.5% of the world's population. Thus, the USA was in a position to buy the sort of future that it wanted. And, having just brought the latest war in europe to a close,  it had a special interest there.

The Marshall plan, which would cost the USA some $13 billion, was fundamental to the rebuilding of post-war europe. The USA was very concerned about the possibility of the spread of communism at the end of the second world war. In Germany, Italy and elsewhere communism had growing support. To have won the war but ultimately lost europe to communism would be failure and people like Kennan felt that european industry, particularly German industry, needed to be quickly rebuilt unless communism was to spread across into western Europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

Kennan's  PPS23 memo, 

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Memo_PPS23_by_George_Kennan 

contains some insights into how the USA looked at the rest of the world in 1948. Modern day eurosceptics may find it interesting to see how an American thinker looked towards a federated Europe, with active participation by Britain.

"Some form of political, military and economic union in Western Europe will be necessary if the free nations of Europe are to hold their own against the people of the east united under Moscow rule.

It is questionable whether this union could be strong enough to serve its designed purpose unless it had the participation and support of Great Britain.… Britain could be encouraged to proceed vigorously with her plans for participation in a European union," 

Well, we know how that turned out. But alternate possibilities are also conjectured by Kennan.

"If we were to take Britain into our own U.S.-Canadian orbit, according to some formula of “Union now”, this would probably solve Britain's long term economic problem and create a natural political entity of great strength. But this would tend to cut Britain off from the close political association she is seeking with continental nations and might therefore have the ultimate effect of rendering the continental nations more vulnerable to Russian pressure'

The Union Now reference, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Now is a pre-war proposal by an American journalist, Clarence Streit, who "proposed a Union that, along the lines of American federalism, brought together the democracies of Europe, North America and former parts of the British Empire, under a single government with the power to grant citizenship and wage war; its membership would expand as more nations joined the democratic camp." (Those former parts of the British Empire being the white parts.) 

This future then, would be a uniion, with a common currency, freedom to work anywhere, and no trade tariffs between the sovereign states. It's a kind of super EU which includes  North America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand as well. Although, as George Orwell pointed out in an essay Not Counting Niggers, the whites would retain the privilege and the black population of the British and French empires would continue to be exploited.

In 1948 there were fears, shared by the Soviet Union, that a united Germany would present a future danger. Kennan again, "If there is no real European federation and if Germany is restored as a strong and independent country, we must expect another attempt at German domination." Other options in Kennan's paper are, the possibility of a federal Europe where Germany is broken up into much smaller pieces. Perhaps along the lines of the occupation zones of the time. With the Federal Europe to include this weakened, partioned Germany.

In the end, of course, a partitioned Germany with the western part as a cornerstone of the EU is what we got. Later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a Germany united with many of its former components restored and with a large part of Europe united in a common currency.

The Marshall plan, which came with strings attached, played a big part in shaping present day Europe. But it's not all turned out according to Kennan's futures. He didn't predict the demise of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent admission of so many of the eastern, former communist block, states to the EU. (the law of unintended consequences/beware of what you wish for) And that Union Now idea melted away. Paving the way for a much larger EU, eventually including more parts of eastern europe.

Today's European Union has a larger economy than the USA, see table. The union has succeeded beyond all expectations. wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP

	GDP (millions of US$)
	World	62,911,253
	European Union	16,242,256
	United States	14,526,550
	China, People's Republic of	5,878,257

The eurosceptics in Britain will, no doubt, continue to predict the imminent demise of the EU, and many will long for that special relationship between Britain and the USA. Interesting that it could have gone that way  if different choices had been made, back in 1948.