Robert Kenner addresses a topic last raised, more splenetically, in Craig Rosebraugh’s 2012 film Greedy Lying Bastards: the growth industry of climate-change doubt: “denial” doesn’t do justice to its strategic cunning and potency. Like Rosebraugh, Kenner tells us that big oil is using the same tactics – and often the same personnel – as big tobacco: set up any number of supposedly independent thinktanks, get plausible professionals on the (mouthwatering) payroll, and just sow the seeds of doubt. You undermine conviction, filibuster government action, fog public opinion, get brazen blowhards to shout loudly on Fox News. And the people best at this are the ageing, neocon attack dogs, veterans of the tobacco wars, who in the evening of their lives find a thrilling new purpose in climate change doubt-production. The subject strangely brings back memories of Robert Stone’s 2013 documentary Pandora’s Promise, which endorsed the environmental pro-nuclear case and had startling footage of Margaret Thatcher denouncing fossil fuels and man-made climate change because she was in favour of nuclear energy. Merchants of Doubt is a worthwhile, though depressing film.
