The Cosmos first broadcast on April 20th wasn’t really about lead. It was partly about lead obviously, and about determining the age of the Earth, but you’d have to be unacquainted with environmental controversies of recent decades to miss the real point. Political and religious conservatives have gotten upset about different parts of the series, but this was the part that really should annoy them, because it exposed their methods of spreading doubt among the public and policy makers ,where none exists among scientists, because the evidence is dreadfully inconvenient. Actually, if you really want to understand science denialism: it’s not the evidence that’s inconvenient, but the conclusions the evidence leads to.
You might not expect some connection between leaded gasoline and the age of the Earth, but Neil deGrasse Tyson borrowed a technique from another classic documentary series, James Burke’s Connections, where things that look utterly unrelated are directly connected (some episodes are posted on Youtube, click over as soon as you’re done reading this). The Cosmos episode is called The Clean Room from one of these connections. Chemist Clair Patterson was seeking to determine the age of the Earth by comparing the proportions of lead and uranium in a meteorite sample. Earth’s rocks get mixed together by our active geology, but meteors have been floating around since the start of the solar system. Lead is the decay product of uranium, and uranium’s decay rate was known, so compare the two, and there’s the age of the solar system.
It sounds simple, but the measurements of lead changed with every measurement, which Patterson realized was from his samples being contaminated with outside lead. His years of efforts to find ways to keep all lead out of his samples led to the invention of the titular clean room. So he learned Earth was 4.5 billion years old, which was the purpose, but he also discovered how pervasive lead was in our environment. His further investigations of lead revealed that the source of lead was man-made, the lead added to gasoline (there are other sources, but that was by far the most important).
Lead was known to be a neurotoxin, so the manufacturers of cars and gasoline put public health first, and jumped all over getting the lead out of the environment. Oops, sorry, that was in rational-world, not the real one.
What really happened was the affected industries claimed lead was naturally occurring and not all that harmful. They paid scientists to make their claims and deny that there was really any evidence lead was coming from human sources. They claimed there was controversy where there was none, and claimed those saying lead came from the lead added to gasoline were of questionable loyalty.
In case I need to spell it out, for lead pollution, you may indeed substitute cigarettes, ozone depletion, or global warming. The denier industry, the people Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway dubbed the “Merchants of Doubt”, pioneered its methods in order to avoid having to remove lead from gasoline.
Tyson didn’t say explicitly he was talking about more recent controversies. I kind of wish he had, though I get that he wants only to be explicitly scientific, not explicitly political. Still, I wonder if people who haven’t followed these issues closely would be familiar with the meta issue of how confusion has been deliberately created by well-funded special interests who enjoy the profits that come from creating pollution that other people have to pay for. The term is “externalized costs”, which just means I do something and get the profits while you get the costs.
Here’s hoping there’s a chunk of the audience that, having seen the deception involved in protecting leaded gasoline, will get it when shown how global warming deniers are doing exactly the same thing. Conservatives, as ticked off as they might be about showing that the age of the Earth is a fact no matter how badly it conflicts with religious beliefs, should be more ticked off that Tyson exposed their methods of deception in environmental controversies.
cross-posted at MN Progressive Project