Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

During the time when scientists were debating about SDI and nuclear winter, some of the same scientists also debated acid rain: “As in the debate over tobacco, opponents of regulating the pollution that caused acid rain would argue that the science was too uncertain to justify action” (66).

In 1955, the US Department of Agriculture established the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest to examine the effects of acid rain. Although naturally occurring acid rain—from volcanoes or other natural phenomena—and man-made acid rain was widely recognized as occurring, Hubbard Brook found that acid rain existed even in the most remote places in America, which was worrisome to many scientists. The Hubbard Brook work coincided with a shift in American thinking about environmentalism from broadly popular land preservation to science-based government regulation, an idea that was unpopular in conservative circles. People began to realize that reasonable-seeming private actions—such as spraying crops with pesticides—could have global repercussions, as in the usage of DDT: “Pollution was not simply a matter of evil industries dumping toxic sludge in the night: people with good intentions might unintentionally do harm” (68).

Hubbard Brook, and especially scientist Gene Likens, demonstrated that acid rain was a part of collateral damage from emissions, in a paper declaring that acid rain or snow fell in most of northeastern America. Part of this problem came as a result of trying to purify the air, which counter intuitively made it more acidic and led to the pollution being more widely disbursed. The research indicated that:

it was too soon to tell whether or not widespread and serious ecological damage was occurring [as a result of acid rain], but the potential effects were troubling [and included the] leaching of nutrients from soil and plant foliage, acidification of lakes and rivers, damage to wildlife, and corrosion of buildings and other structures (69).

As is common in the discovery of a new scientific phenomenon, at first the evidence was published in scattered journals in many different countries and languages, and gradually American scientists like Likens began to connect the dots. A group of Swedish scientists counseled the UN that the effects of acid rain could be reversed by regulating air pollution, inspiring a decade of scientists to explore acid rain and its myriad effects. Even though the science of Likens and other scientists seemed clear, many people still doubted its causality: “For acid rain, the consensus of experts was that anthropogenic sulfur was implicated, but exactly how that sulfur moved through the atmosphere and exactly how much damage it could do was still being worked out” (71). However, many people doubted that the sulfur was anthropogenic and not naturally occurring, although few of these people were scientists.

To combat this argument, scientists used isotopes to demonstrate where the carbon and/or sulfur came from, concluding that it came from manmade sources. By 1979, the belief that acid rain came from burning fossil fuels was solidified in mainstream science and disseminated to the public. 

“Political Action and the US-Canadian Rift”

“In 1979, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe passed the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Pollution” (73), making it illegal to pollute other countries and forcing nations to control emissions that might be in anyway harmful. The US and Canada began their own negotiations; the US was represented by Chairman of Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality Gus Speth, who believed that corporations, especially power companies, were responsible for acid rain and should have better controlled their emissions. Much of Canada’s acid rain was caused by US emissions, and the Carter administration worked to establish committees to monitor acid rain and to enforce air pollution control laws, trying to work towards stronger regulations.

“Skepticism in the Reagan White House”

In 1980, Reagan came to power and promised to reduce government regulation. Although the government was still working with Canada to come up with stronger regulations, its scientists began to “emphasize uncertainties rather than settled knowledge” (75), leading to recommendations that were not as stringent as Canada hoped. Indeed, the work that had been done in previous negotiations had been revised to make the science, and especially the causality of acid rain, seem more ambiguous. Canada was not happy, especially when Congress rejected a joint pollution control program in 1984. The American government believed that this divergence in policy was due to a difference in interpretation of the facts: Canada had much more of its economy resting in fish, forests, and tourism, and so they would see the circumstances as much direr than Americans, and the Americans were responsible for more of the pollution and therefore would have shouldered the fiscal burden of its cleanup.

“Getting a Third Opinion”

However, this was not entirely the case, as the Reagan administration had handpicked a group of scientists to create a panel to review acid rain, instead of using the National Academy of Sciences and the Canadian Royal Society, both of which had already concluded that acid rain had anthropogenic causality and was incredibly harmful to humans and the environment, as well as that stricter regulations were needed:“The administration’s outright rejection of the conclusions of the nation’s most distinguished and qualified experts caused considerable consternation in scientific and regulatory circles” (78).

Of course, these calls for regulations did not coincide with Regan’s political platform to decrease governmental regulations, and so Nierenberg was approached to use science in order to prevent stricter regulations, as he had been conducting his own work which said that no further action was necessary beyond more research. Like many of the other conservative scientists, Nierenberg viewed environmentalists as Luddites.

Nierenberg enlisted Sherwood Rowland, an expert on chlorinated fluorocarbons and how they damage the ozone layer, to help the panel on acid rain. Rowland was concerned because he believed that acid rain was a problem, but found out that many on the panel shared his concerns, including Gene Likens.

“The Nierenberg Acid Rain Peer Review Panel”

The panel had to review the work of the American and Canadian groups, affirming that “acid rain was serious and sufficiently documented to warrant policy action now” (81). However, one member of the panel, Fred Singer, who was not picked by Nierenberg, wrote an appendix to the review stressing the uncertainty of the evidence concerning acid rain. Singer “was a physicist who owed his career to the Cold War” (82) and also had a contentious relationship with many other scientists, who he did not view as giving him adequate credit for his work. This gradually caused him to move away from science and into governmental policy. At first, Singer was an environmentalist, believing that a quality environment is necessary to life. However, his views changed in the 1970s, and “he began to worry more about the cost of environmental protection, and to feel that it might not be worth the gain” (84), looking towards technology as a social savior and embracing a market-based approach. He believed that decreasing government regulations, specifically on oil, would decrease public dependence, allowing the free market to regulate itself.

When the White House asked Nierenberg to head the Acid Rain Peer Review Panel, they nixed several of his choices, including multiple scientists who had voiced concern about global warming and/or acid rain, and added Singer to the mix. They convened to create a report, as well as a press release for the report. The drafted press release was strongly worded in support of government regulation of emissions to curb acid rain and included harrowing details about the lasting harmful effects. But when the draft came back from the White House, many of the strongest details had been struck out, and the remaining information had been reworded “stressing that pollution was already partially controlled, and then moving straight on to the uncertainties that might be taken to suggest that further controls were not justified” (87).

Another panel document was additionally revised by Singer, stressing the scientific uncertainty of acid deposition’s cause, the cost and unreliability of control technologies, and previous legislature already in place to control acid deposition. Singer circulated many papers and issued many other revisions to panel materials, all of which presented the following: “that the science was uncertain, that more research was needed, that the economic consequences of controlling acid rain would be too great, and that acid rain might be caused by natural sources” (89), all of which aligned with the official position of the electrical utility industry. Many other reports were circulated within the panel. However, most of this information—including that which was generated by Singer himself—should have been irrelevant to the panel, as they were merely meant to examine the science behind acid rain, and not to comment on economic policy. Singer’s insistence on the lack of monetary value to be ascribed to natural resources (such as lakes and bacteria) led to arguments within the panel itself, with most of the members siding against Singer and maintaining that government regulations were necessary to halt the consequences of emissions. Even though none of the other eight panelists agreed with him, Singer wrote to a House of Representatives committee elucidating his point of view and making it appear as though there was some dissent within the scientific community.

In the report that followed, Singer’s beliefs had been relegated to an appendix, which was completely at odds with the rest of the report and stressed that the only cost that mattered was the cost of pollution control, not the cost of ecological damage, and that the most practical approach would be market-based, although what this entailed was left to the reader’s imagination:“For a man who worried enormously about scientific uncertainties, he was remarkably untroubled by economic ones” (93).

His last sentence was a question meant to fill the reader with doubt as to whether government regulation (and a reduction in emissions) lessen the environmental impacts believed to be associated with acid rain, a question in-line with the official statement of the Reagan administration. As a result of the report, the House of Representatives voted against further government regulation on emissions. Much of the business-centered press (including the Wall Street Journal), perpetuated Singer’s beliefs. However, much of what was written came out before the report was released to the public.

“Manipulating Peer Review”

Multiple congressmen and newspapers alleged that the Reagan administration suppressed the report in order to sway the congressional vote. Although Nierenberg denied it, the historical record shows that changes were made after the report was finished and without the agreement of the full panel. These changes weakened the message, and Singer and Nierenberg had played a role in both of them. The Executive Summary—which had been changed by the Reagan administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy—and Singer’s appendix had never been approved by the panelists. They noted their distress at the alterations made, and Likens asked why these alterations had been made. Many were upset that the journal Science suggested that the panelists had allowed for these alterations, which they either had no knowledge of or had cautioned against.

“Nierenberg responded [to his fellow panelists] by suggesting that he too had been misled, or at least confused” (99), failing to notice that the versions of the Executive Summary were different. However, it would have been difficult and irregular for the White House to alter the report by itself, without Nierenberg’s knowledge. Many panelists acknowledged this, holding Nierenberg responsible for the changes, which historical documents corroborate, as well as notes in Nierenberg’s own hand which acknowledge administrative tampering with the scientific report.

The Reagan administration congratulated Nierenberg on his loyalty and refused to address acid rain, citing the problem’s expense as the justification for the lack of government regulations. The Reagan administration’s official position was similar to the tobacco industry’s, in the debate about the harms of cigarette smoking: “‘We don’t know what’s causing it’” (101). More articles were circulated with unscientific facts which aligned themselves with this position: “Many people became confused, thinking that the acid rain issue was unsettled, that scientists had no consensus” (102), when it was really only a few scientists speaking very loudly and in alignment with business interests. The Reagan administration commissioned another report by theochemist Laurence Krup, who famously tried “to reconcile geological evidence with Christian belief” (103). The report found that acid rain did not present as great a threat as people imagined, even though most scientists openly disagreed.

In the 1990s, the HW Bush administration amended the Clean Air Act to allow for an emissions trading system to control acid rain. In seventeen years, sulfur dioxide levels declined by 54%, and the economic benefits were ten times as great as the costs:

The energy industry had often accused environmentalists of scaremongering, yet this is what they had done with their claims of economic devastation. Protecting the environment didn’t produce economic devastation….It didn’t even cause the price of electricity to rise (103).

But while conservatives believed they had solve the acid rain problem, Likens continued to study it, concluding that acid rain still presented a problem and was causing the forest to shrink. The Clean Air Act amendments were not enough, as they neither eliminated acid rain nor reduced it so that the environment could stabilize. Likens and his colleagues believed that the CAA caps were set too high, and that further national and global regulations were needed. But Singer and the George Marshall Institute continued to insist that the damage caused by acid rain was unknown, despite citing no studies to back up this claim.

Research demonstrates that federal regulation is often the most efficient way of stimulating technological advancements. Although there are other methods of incentivizing—including grants and tax breaks—few are as effective and efficient as government regulation: “If companies know they have to meet a firm regulation with definite deadline, they respond—and innovate” (105).