Another weekend, another great moviegoing experience seeing a documentary in Milwaukee. Last weekend I had a debaucherous bachelor party to attend which caused me to not see a movie. I know, for shame. But I’ve made up for it by checking out Merchants of Doubt from Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner. This might not be so much of a movie review as my thoughts on the subjects presented. Sorry for the rant. This film, while it does tend to preach to the choir, can be really enlightening for those on the fence of the climate ‘debate’. I put debate in quotes because that’s what this film does, it exposes how there shouldn’t be a debate, or at least not in the way it is occurring now. The two sides of the debate are using very different tactics and players. The skeptics side is employing the techniques of Big Tobacco by employing public relations experts with tenuous science backgrounds to play to existing biases and convictions to sew doubt on climate change. This is of course driven by big corporate salaries, but the film delves deeper than that, not accepting money as the sole driving force behind deception on critical issues. Searching for answers it arrives at the anti-communism from the early 50s to anti-regulation libertarianism today as ideologic backers that allow these skeptic PR experts to align themselves with corporate interests. Merchants of Doubt looks generally into the tobacco, chemical, and energy industries and the causes they support and the legislation they seek to kill. Cancers and global climate change be damned.
The film examines the tobacco debate that extended from the early 50s until the early 00s in some cases. How we went from thinking of cigarettes as part of daily life to them now being almost completely regulated and universally seen as cancer sticks. It shows how Big Tobacco knew of the risks very early on, but unwilling to see profits dwindle hid the science and obscured the results for decades. Eventually the public triumphed and everyone is aware of the risks, the appropriate parties punished with massive fines levied, and advertising cigarettes being so limited as to be virtually nonexistent. Any way you see this it is a victory for the public with less smoking related cancers projected for the future. Kenner examines things even further by showing how the chemical industry was benefited by fire retardant requirements in furniture that were pushed through by groups backed by Big Tobacco and Chemical companies that instead of making them create a self extinguishing cigarette when home fires caused by cigarettes were on the rise in the 70s they placed the blame at the ‘fuel’, the furniture. Except the chemicals, up to two pounds of them per couch, were found to be very harmful and to not prevent fires from spreading. Too much money would be lost from changing the cigarette, and too much money could be gained from adding fire retardants to all our furniture. So public relation experts convinced the fire fighting community to switch their attacks from cigarettes to furniture makers. Misdirection at its finest. Which is why it’s so funny when the director interviews magicians and shows them doing their tricks to juxtapose a fun magic show with something very real and very harmful to everyone in their daily lives.
Kenner then lays out how the same exact tactics are being used by energy companies to deny climate change. Now full disclosure: I was very skeptical about global warming in my youth. It was clear the planet was warming due to the greenhouse effect to me then, but I didn’t accept that humans could be the main driver of this. It didn’t make sense. It’s not a natural thing to think how humans could change a planet on this scale. But while I feel strong in my opinions I am willing to change them should evidence direct me to. And in the early 2000s the science became clearer to me and the data undeniable. The great thing about science is that it’s true whether you believe it or not. So to me there is no climate debate about whether it is occurring, and even if it was caused primarily by humans. The only debate that remains is what to do. Scientists, real actual scientists trained in climatology, are not in disagreement. The documentary shows that the players that debate scientists on TV and raise doubts in congressional hearings are given large amounts of money by companies that profit from holding off legislation designed to curb carbon emissions. These players are ideological. Now politics are all fun and good, but this is not a political debate. Science tells us what is happening, and now it is a moral decision about whether we want future generations to enjoy the planet as we have or that we need to squeeze every dollar out of it now and leave these future generations to solve problems they did not create. It is all about framing the question.
Now then this is where some skeptics would find this documentary very objectionable. While it shows how the deceptions occurs and should make everyone sufficiently angry about being lied to, it is also a not so veiled call to join the environmental movement. But I don’t think the film would have been as potent if it just focused on the dour and didn’t offer any solutions. Finding problems is easy, saying what can be done about them is hard. These are hard questions and making personal attacks on the opposition is not serving either side. Once we can accept climate change is truly occurring and we as humans play a large role in it, then the debate can happen about what is the best thing to be done. Until then the ‘debate’ that occurs is designed to simply delay action while Exxon and others make all the money they can. It is even shown how they benefit from receding ice in arctic Russia that allows them to explore for oil and gas in regions that previously were unreachable. The debate needs to be on how this benefits the public, but the public relation psuedo pundits have duped a large swath of people into believing their interests are aligned with Big Energy. This is done easily because people generally don’t like being told how their lives have been lived so far is bad for the planet. But we didn’t know better, now we do. Now change is necessary.
If you enjoyed Food, Inc. and An Inconvenient Truth you’ll like this documentary a lot. I am not a fan of Michael Moore’s brand of propaganda filmmaking, Kenner can veer close to that at times but theres is an important difference. Moore’s issues are political and economic, Kenner’s are scientific and moral. So maybe it’s preaching to the choir, but I don’t consider myself a member of the choir. I just think I followed the data to the only conclusion it leads to. Science is a great tool, politics is too. We just have to know when to use which one. Politics in regards to global climate change will benefit interests with money behind them, science will benefit the planet and the actual humans who live on it. Denier, supporter, liberal, conservative, or in between, this movie is well worth seeing.
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