Science Propaganda wars (The Ecologist)
Propaganda wars: ‘pro-science’ GMO, chemicals boosters funded by climate change deniers
Stacy Malkan
28th February 2017
Excerpt
They promote GMOs, defend toxic chemicals, and attack people who raise concerns about those products as ‘anti-science’. But behind the slick ‘astroturf’ PR fronts lurk some very dubious funders: the same arch-conservative foundations that finance climate science denial. Stacy Malkan exposes the key players in the agribusiness and chemical industry propaganda wars.
British writer George Monbiot has a warning for those of us trying to grasp the new political realities in the US and the UK. “We have no hope of understanding what is coming until we understand how the dark money network operates”, he wrote in the Guardian.Corporate America may have been slow to warm up to Donald Trump, but once Trump secured the nomination, “the big money began to recognize an unprecedented opportunity”, Monbiot wrote.”His incoherence was not a liability, but an opening: his agenda could be shaped. And the dark money network already developed by some American corporations was perfectly positioned to shape it.”
This network, or dark money ATM as Mother Jones described it, refers to the vast amount of hard-to-trace money flowing from arch-conservative billionaires, such as Charles and David Koch and allies, and corporations into front groups that promote extreme free-market ideas – for example, fights against public schools, unions, environmental protection, climate change policies and science that threatens corporate profits.
Investigative writers Jane Mayer, Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway and others have exposed how “the story of dark money and the story of climate change denial are the same story: two sides of the same coin”, as US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse described it last year in a speech. The strategies of the “Koch-led, influence-buying operation” – including propaganda operations that spin science with no regard for the truth – “are probably the major reason we don’t have a comprehensive climate bill in Congress”, Whitehouse said. While these strategies have been well-tracked in the climate sphere, less reported is the fact that the funders behind climate-science denial also bankroll a network of PR operatives who have built careers spinning science to deny the health risks of toxic chemicals in the food we eat and products we use every day.
The stakes are high for our nation’s health. Rates of childhood cancer are now 50% higher than when the ‘war on cancer’ began decades ago, and the best weapon is one we are hardly using: policies to limit exposure to cancer-causing chemicals.
“If we want to win the war on cancer, we need to start with the thousand physical and chemical agents evaluated as possible, probable or known human carcinogens by the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization”, wrote scientist and author Devra Lee Davis, PhD, MPH, in The Hill.
Reducing known agents of harm has had “less to do with science, and more to do with the power of highly profitable industries that rely on public relations to counteract scientific reports of risks”, Davis noted.
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