Date/Time
Date(s) - April 2, 2024
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location
Theater, Lory Student Center
Categories
The world has known for decades that man-made climate change threatens our health, our wealth, and even the future on life on Earth as we know it. In our first book, Merchants of Doubt, Erik Conway and I showed that climate change denial was rooted in market fundamentalism: the belief that government action in the marketplace threatens personal freedom and puts us on the “road to serfdom.” In our new book, we show how market fundamentalism—linked to the rhetorical framework of the threat of “Big Government”—was cultured, advanced, and sustained by powerful American business interests, and how this political ideology continues today to be a major force blocking climate (and other important political) action today.
Naomi Oreskes is Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, The Times (London), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and other outlets. She is author, co-author, or editor of nine books on science in society, including the best-selling, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury, 2010), Why Trust Science? (2019) and Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean (University of Chicago Press, 2021). The Big Myth, co-authored with Erik M. Conway, was released in 2023.