For years, activists and scholars have contended that groups who reject the scientific consensus on climate change are employing tactics once used to create doubt about the dangers of smoking.
Now environmentalists are taking a page from tobacco opponents by suggesting oil companies misled investors and the public about the risks of climate change. …
While this tactic helped tobacco opponents win over regulators and the public, it may be a less effective approach to addressing political opposition to climate change — an issue on which both elites and the public are deeply divided. CONT.
Brendan Nyhan (Dartmouth), New York Times
There is another big difference vs. tobacco. In the case of climate change the public was hardly denied relevant information. In fact they got the same info all the time from other sources.
But so few citizens read real news that hard facts have come to seem almost as obscure as the communications of scientists conferring with each other were in the middle of the 20th century.
If you read the New York Times you might have caught wind of it.
If you watched Fox News, your emotions were engaged in resisting the evidence before you even understood the problem.
Perhaps, but the oil companies are the target, not Fox news.
Besides, we now have all the information, and we’re still burning oil like crazy.
The information being available doesn’t mean that the significance of it, let alone the urgency, has roused a critical mass of citizens—who are going to have to be pretty active to combat the corporate interests that buried it for so long.
And there’s such a phenomenal capacity for denial, even without the twists,confusion, and outright lies perversely generated by those spurious news sources.
That’s what I was asking about. I don’t think the oil companies were employing climatologists, or anyone else with those skills, so I can’t see how they were to blame for lack of knowledge.