How They Made Us Doubt Everything27 Jul 2020

The Tobacco Playbook: 9. Deep Pockets, Useful Allies

Following the oil money as it’s pumped to contrarian scientists and think tanks. As millions of dollars flow from oil companies to researchers looking into ‘solar variation’ or picking holes in the temperature record, we reveal that ten years previously, oil company researchers had dismissed these very arguments. An internal American Petroleum Institute document from 1995 said ‘hypothesis about the role of solar variability and Michaels’ questions about temperature record are not convincing arguments against any conclusion that we are currently experiencing warming as a result of greenhouse gas emissions’. So why were they funding people who made these arguments years later?

From climate change to smoking and cancer, this is the story of how doubt has been manufactured. This 10 part series explores how powerful interests and sharp PR managers engineered doubt about the connection between smoking and cancer and how similar tactics were later used by some to make us doubt climate change. With the help of once-secret internal memos, we take you behind boardroom doors where such strategies were drawn up and explore how the narrative changed on one of the most important stories of our time - and how the marketing of doubt has undermined our willingness to believe almost everything.

Clip used from 'The Hunt' series from 2015 by David Attenborough and Hunter Films Ltd.

Presenter: Peter Pomerantsev Producer: Phoebe Keane

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(17)

Talc Tales: 5. Talc on trial

When we send off make-up for testing, the lab finds an asbestos fibre in two of the samples. Brunel University’s Experimental Technique’s Centre says they need to find at least 3 fibres to confirm the...

5 Aug 202414min

Talc Tales: 4. ‘Time for more confusion’

When talc might be listed as a potential carcinogen, the industry assembles a ‘talc task force’. It’s the year 2000 and the talc industry has heard something big is coming its way. The US government a...

5 Aug 202415min

Talc Tales: 3. ‘We may have problems’

Could companies clean up their talc? In the 1970s, talc companies worked out a plan to check their product for asbestos fibres. The problem was, mineralogist Sean Fitzgerald says the testing method th...

5 Aug 202414min

Talc Tales: 2. Never 100% clean

In the 1970s, a scientist discovers asbestos fibres in talcum powder. After Mineralogist Arthur Langer discovered asbestos fibres in the lungs of normal people in New York, he set out to investigate t...

5 Aug 202415min

Talc Tales: 1. Asbestos in my make-up?

After Hannah Fletcher’s cancer diagnosis, she investigates whether her make up contained asbestos. She was just 41 when she was diagnosed with mesothelioma – a rare cancer that’s very hard to treat. T...

5 Aug 202414min

Introducing Talc Tales

Is there asbestos in make-up? If you look through your make-up bag, you might have a blusher, eye shadow or face powder that contains the ingredient talc. But there are questions about its safety. Wom...

28 Jul 20241min

The Tobacco Playbook: 10. Leaving the Tribe

Our story ends at the very top, with a fax to the White House. The campaign to spread doubt about climate change was so successful, it infiltrated the White House. In 2007, a House of Representatives ...

27 Jul 202014min