Lies, damned lies, and big-business funded think-tanks.
In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore points out that it's difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. So true this is.
Imagine if one of the largest tobacco companies was heavily funding a "Tobacco is a healthy habit" think-tank. These people spent money on advertising, hired lots of "experts" to tell the public that tobacco was fine. Further, if anyone ever manages to find negative consequences of tobacco, so, cancer, they immediately blame it on "existing health conditions", despite strong evidence of a correlation between tobacco use and cancer. Now, someone in the government, perhaps tired of trying to find ways of funding public health, which is more expensive because of the number of tobacco-induced cancers being treated on tax-payer dollars, tries to get this "think-tank" shut down. Possibly by just asking the tobacco companies to stop funding them. The tobacco industry, or sock puppets on their behalf, are immediately up in arms at this attempt to squelch the "little guy" with the entirely reasonable contrary opinion. There are two sides to the story, of course, and both can be reasonably heard.
Now, we've been through this in this country, and the tobacco industry has taken its licks. Thank goodness for eventual corporate responsibility.
Unfortunately, this kind of tactic still passes in other industries.
Recently, Senators Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) and Snowe (R-Maine) wrote a letter to Exxon, strongly asking them to stop their "obfuscation agenda", in the name of funding passed to such slimy think tanks as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (see some of their work here). Now, the Wall Street Journal was nice enough to rebut the letter in an article called The Global Warming Gag Order. Among other things, they say that those supporting climate reform are “so afraid of debate that they want Exxon to stop financing a doughty band of dissenters who can barely get their name in the paper". Big bully senators should leave alone "think tanks" with no real scientific support on their side. Huh. It'll be ok, though, because Carbon Dioxide is "life" (see the link above from CEI).
Sometimes, we need to prevent people from continuing to propagate lies in the name of "discussion". No one is arguing that these people have a case, we're just trying to stop the runaway propaganda that's so easy to absorb. I'm not saying we should deny anyone the right to free speech, but, when these people can buy their way into the collective intellect, we should be wary. Exxon should take the high road on this one, and walk away from their "obfuscation agenda", before someone successfully points out the cancer their product is giving to the earth.
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