The Denial Machine investigates the roots of the campaign to negate the science and the threat of global warming. It tracks the activities of a group of scientists, some of whom previously consulted for for Big Tobacco, and who are now receiving donations from major coal and oil companies.
In the past few years, a hurricane has engulfed the debate about global warming. This scientific issue has become a rhetorical firestorm with science pitted against spin and inflammatory words on both sides.
How could scientific fact, which many believe could determine the very future of the planet, become a political battleground, pitting left versus right, environmentalist versus climate change sceptic?
Global warming: potential costs?
A recent British report estimates that the projected costs of global warming to be as costly as both world wars and the Great Depression added together. Yet, with such consequences, some scientists still insist that climate change, if it is happening at all, could be a good thing.
The Denial Machine investigates the roots of the campaign to negate the science and the threat of global warming. It tracks the activities of a group of scientists, some of whom previously consulted for for Big Tobacco, and who are now receiving donations from major coal and oil companies.
Who is keeping the debate of global warming alive?
The documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global warming was real and had potentially catastrophic consequences. It shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those willing to question the science behind climate change, providing funding for some of them, their organizations and their studies.
The Denial Machine also explores how the arguments supported by oil companies were adopted by policy makers in both Canada and the U.S. and helped form government policy.
NOTE TO READERS:
This story included a segment of an interview with Jim Hoggan, who subsequently realized he had incorrectly characterized a letter sent to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He quickly corrected the error through his website, DeSmogBlog, as follows:
In a TV interview that aired last week on a CBC fifth estate climate change documentary called The Denial Machine, I made a reference to a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper that denied the science behind climate change and urged the government to back away from any related regulation. In this reference, I said: "We looked into the folks who were on that, and all but 19 were Americans and many of them are kind of infamous characters from the states who worked for the tobacco industry."
That was incorrect. I should have said that only 19 of the signatories were Canadian, and that some are kind of infamous characters from the states who worked for the tobacco industry. I regret the error and apologize unreservedly to all those who may have taken offence from this mistake.
(A footnote: a few days after Prime Minister Harper received that letter, he had another, from 90 of Canada's most senior climate scientists and oceanographers. This second letter cited "an increasing urgency to act on the threat of climate change", and called upon the government to develop a national policy on climate change and strategies to adapt to what it said was "the inevitable changes that will affect us all".)
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/denialmachine/
