[Excerpt]...Specter blithely ignores the political economy of science as it is practiced. That oversight severely limits the value of his book.
But there’s another, even more glaring oversight at work here. In a book devoted to “denialism,” and “how irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet, and threatens our lives,” there is almost no discussion of the most powerful and successful of all the denier cliques: those who insist human-induced climate change is a hoax.
So what do we find in these pages? We get a chapter defending the pharmaceutical industry against critics who question its wares—an industry with nearly $300 billion in sales in the U.S. alone, and fast-growing markets overseas. Specter’s defense aside, Big Pharma typically vies with “oil and mining” and “commercial banks” for the title of most profitable industry in the United States.
There’s a chapter decrying those who question the necessity of vaccinations—even as global child vaccine rates continue to rise. (Indeed, according to a recent report, the main factor holding vaccines back isn’t denialism, but rather their heightened cost.)
We get a chapter lambasting what Specter calls the “organic fetish”—even though organic food sales remain less than 5 percent of the U.S. market (as Specter acknowledges). But really, this chapter (more on which below) amounts to a ringing defense of genetically modified organisms—which can now be found in 75 percent+ of the offerings on supermarket shelves.
Another chapter blasts the herbal remedy and supplement market—substantial at $23 billion in sales per year (according to this report), but still a fraction of the pharma market’s size.
In other words, Specter mainly trains his sights on unsuccessful or marginally empowered “deniers,” such as those challenging the pharma behemoth or vaccines for children.
But what about the successful deniers—the ones who have managed to block any meaningful response to climate change from the federal government, and are even now fouling up the effort to pass an effective climate bill? These folks, part of a loosely concerted movement funded largely by the oil and coal industries, get barely a mention in Denialism; they certainly don’t rate a chapter.
The book’s index has no entry for “climate change.” The entry for
“Global warming” cites just one page—a reference to genetically
modified foods as a “solution” to global warming.
