I've received - and read - my copy of the book (ISDN:
978-1-59691-610-4).It's a historical study of a series of campaigns to persuade the American public that various scientific conclusions - about the dangers of smoking, acid-rain, the ozone hole, secondary smoking and global warming - weren't well founded. It also includes a section discussing the posthumous attack on Rachel Carson which falsely claimed that her observations about the dangers of the indiscriminate use of DDT had killed loads of people because it stopped DDT being used against malaria.
It concentrates of a group of once-emminent scientists who were active in most of the campaigns (despite the fact that they weren't expert in any of the sciences involved), and points out that their common feature is a strong belief in free-market capitalism, coupled to irrational anxieties about socialism (which they see as leading to communism).
Their objection to the science behind the campaigns to ban smoking, to fit power station smoke stacks with sulphur scrubbers, to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CF's), and to reduce the amount of CO2 being injected into the atmosphere, is what George Soros calls "free market fundamentalism" which rejects the idea of using goverment regulation to reduce "negative externalities" which is to say the damage to the rest of the world created by - say - fouling your workplace with second hand smoke, destroying boreal forests by burning sulphur-rich coal and bunker oil in your power stations, creating the ozone hole by venting CFCs to the atmosphere, and increasing global warming by burning fossil carbon and venting the CO2 produced into the atmosphere.
Their attitude is that the free market should be left to deal with this, despite the fact that it obviously won't.
Since they can't produce a rational case against regulation, they devote their energy to fighting irrational campaigns directed at devalueing the scientific evidence that would motivate the regulation, if a majority believed the evidence. They failed on smoking, the ozone hole and acid rain, but so far seem to be doing pretty on global warming - they've fooled enough of the people enough of the time.
This doesn't - directly - explain their posthumous campaign to discredit Rachel Carson, which appears to be an attack on the environmentalist community, who are more sensitve than most to "negative externalities" and traditionally inclined to campaign for government regulation to stop people pulluting the environment. The campaign against Rachel Carson happens to be particularly stupid - DDT had fallen out of favour as a defense against malaria before "Silent Spring" was published because it had stopped working, and it had stopped working because it had been used widely an indiscriminately in agriculture, breeding a generation of mosquitos who had adapted to DDT in the environment and didn't die when exposed to it.
Oddly enough, if DDT had only been used as a defense against malaria and other insect-bourne diseases, it would probably still be effective today - in that role it was only sprayed inside the houses of the people who needed to be protected, and the wider population of insects wouldn't have been exposed to enough of it to allow them to evolve resistance.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen