Book Review: Industrial Strength Denial
Industrial-Strength Denial author Barbra Freese calls for increased corporate responsibility, but we need to think much bigger if we’re going to survive the climate crisis.
Photo by Ant Rozetsky.
The climate crisis writ large has been called a “problem from hell” and the description is accurate. The litany of roadblocks to effective climate action is as well-known as it is long: the economic self-interest of nations and the “imperative” of economic growth, the necessity of international cooperation, the challenge of motivating individuals around a long-term issue whose consequences are too devastating for any one of us to grasp in their entirety.
The current state of climate politics in the US, however, is the product of a deliberate, decades-long campaign—orchestrated largely, but not exclusively, by the fossil fuel industry—of misinformation, misrepresentation, and the outright denial of scientific facts. As the focus of the climate movement has increasingly pivoted from a focus on individual responsibility (finally, we recognize that recycling our yogurt cups won’t save the planet) to the need for systemic change, there has been a concurrent surge of interest from journalists and academics—from Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s classic Merchants of Doubt to Amy Westervelt’s climate-denial-as-true-crime podcast Drilled—in documenting and exposing the roots of contemporary narratives of climate denial.
Barbara Freese’s Industrial-Strength Denial, as the title suggests, joins this chorus, investigating a series of historical examples in which corporate interests ran counter to health, safety and/or ethics, and the processes by which those industries were brought to heel. Though they can be gruesome in their gritty detail, none of her case studies are particularly new or surprising. Across eight chapters, Freese explores the phenomenon of denialism vis-a-vis slavery; radium; “that wonderful stimulant”; car design and safety; leaded gasoline; chloroflourocarbons (CFCs); tobacco; the financial crisis of 2008-10; and, last but not least, climate change. Climate denialists are, in Freese’s book, people with “an unshakeable belief that climate change is simply no big deal and there is no reason to go out of our way to prevent more of it.” This definition, as she notes in an aside, creates a problematic grey-zone when it comes to companies like ExxonMobil. Though Exxon believes that climate change is both real and a problem—which, by Freese’s definition, would mean it does not fall into the ‘denier’ category—as a company, it continues to fund people and organizations that do deny the reality of the climate crisis. Moreover, Exxon’s purported acceptance of the science has not led it to, say, cut production in the way one might expect from a company that truly internalized the gravity of the crisis we face. Considering the timeline we’re working with, inaction or insufficient action on climate is climate denial and it matters that we be able to call it out as such.
Freese has spent her career as an environmental lawyer and energy policy analyst and it is the climate crisis—and, more specifically, the deeply-rooted skepticism of climate science that she has encountered in her work—that motivated this book. She is, in effect, searching for an answer to a question we’ve all asked ourselves: “What is wrong with these people? How could they be so impervious to the mountains of evidence and so willing to expose the world to truly catastrophic risk?” The most immediate answer that comes to mind is “economic self-interest,” but while Freese acknowledges this, her interest lies in attempting to understand the messier psychological motivations of the individuals who comprise the corporations, from the lowly sales rep to the CEO, and the relationship of corporate conduct to social norms. She seeks to set her analysis apart from other accounts of corporate malfeasance and denial by focusing on the “social context within which these denials take place” rather than on recounting the manipulation and misrepresentation of scientific facts themselves.
The human ability to rationalize knowledge that is inconvenient, uncomfortable, or otherwise contradictory to deeply-held beliefs is well-recognized. As Freese sees it, it is this ability that is at the root of corporate denialism. She identifies a cornucopia of denial’s manifestations, from the more straightforward kind of self-deception exhibited by makers and advertisers of radium-laced products to the powerful conviction that one’s products are, regardless of their potential harms, on the whole for the good of society. Perhaps the most striking example of the power of self-deception comes in the chapter on radium, in which the same men responsible for promoting radium as a health tonic and denying its devastating effects often themselves died of radium poisoning. Long forgotten, the saga of radium-poisoned factory girls in the US was brought again to the forefront of public consciousness by the 2018 movie Radium Girls, which, ironically, received the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Award (in a subsequent chapter on GM’s resistance to safer car design, Freese writes of Sloan, a former GM executive that “despite his evident interest in social welfare and alleged interest in auto safety, with his corporate hat on, [he] defined his responsibility so narrowly that it did not include trying [to reduce] thousands of deaths every year.”)
Other “blame shelters,” as Freese calls them in a phrase meant to evoke tax shelters, include the well-trodden “I was just following orders”; it’s “not my job”—Sloan’s excuse; ignorance (“No one could have known the consequences, therefore we are not responsible”); and the distinct but related “side effects” rationalization—that any harm caused was unintended and therefore also not something for which a company or an individual need feel responsible. Compounding the perils of self-deception are other human tendencies: a propensity for tribalism and a penchant for aggressively doubling-down to defend oneself or one’s group from “outside” criticism; and a congenital predilection to “underestimate dangers that are hard to conceive of.” All of these factors are at play in climate denialism, along with the more mundane reason of profit. Moreover, as Freese demonstrates, many of the tactics of denial currently deployed by climate denialists—the sowing of doubt and misinformation; the blaming the consumer and claiming the the futility of trying to do anything differently; the portrayal of critics as zealots or crusaders, and the assumption that one’s opponents are themselves motivated by self-interest—were part of the arsenal of corporate denial long before the climate crisis appeared on our radars.
It is one thing to investigate how corporate denialism operates—the mental gymnastics industry representatives perform to reconcile themselves to the harm of their work—but it is another thing entirely to investigate why, and it is not always clear in Industrial Strength Denial which set of questions Freese is trying to answer. Her grasp on her thesis seems to slip when it comes time to connect her broader narrative to corporate denialism on climate in particular, perhaps because she is trying to tell a story that is still unfolding. The critical issue when it comes to corporate climate denialism, though, is not why individuals deeply invested in industries that rely on or benefit from the extractive status quo would support the continuation of that status quo, but rather how fossil fuel corporations in particular have been so overwhelmingly successful at turning scientific facts into a question of partisan politics—and what climate activists can do to change this.
What is clear from the last thirty years is that more information, more science, is not a panacea. We are far beyond the point where a climate version of an Unsafe at Any Speed or a Silent Spring could galvanize public sentiment on climate change in the way that those books did for auto safety and environmental pollution—indeed, the last decade or so has witnessed a relative avalanche of “game-changing” books on the climate crisis, from Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth and Bill McKibben’s Falter to David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, all published in 2019 alone. The problem is not and has never been a lack of information. The problem is that corporations with a massive amount of money and, by extension, power, are deeply and irreversibly invested in the extraction of fossil fuels.
What, then, might be drawn from her analysis of what underlies an individual’s defense of bad practices? It is commonly said that the simplest explanations are the truest, and in many of her chapters, it is often the case that the people responsible for the relevant human destruction simply don’t believe that the problem is a problem. If anything, the last four years of US history ought to have taught us this: the fungibility of reality and truth. Another key factor at play is the structure of the corporation itself, which is, in Freese’s view, perfectly engineered to undermine people’s “moral instincts” and her simple, clear-sighted explanation of how, exactly, that happens is perhaps the most compelling single section of the book. The “corporate form,” with its many narrowly defined roles, its steep hierarchy, its “independent legal existence,” limited liability and the existence of shareholders, and the constant external demands of competition, innovation, and profit, combine to create a environment that excels at detaching any sense of personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s work.
Freese clearly sees, also, the methods by which corporations accused of doing harm will respond: “They will deny causal links between their actions and the harm in question, express baseless confidence in their future exoneration, exaggerate any shred of doubt to maintain the status quo, minimize the alleged harm, shift blame for it to other causes, and/or find ways to justify the harm by viewing it as unavoidable or surely better than the alternatives.” The corporate interest left to itself is not and has never been aligned with the public interest, because the profit motive is not aligned with the public interest, regardless of what Charles Wilson said. Yet the idea that profit and public interest could be aligned—that corporate denialism is an aberration rather than a completely predictable and necessary result of institutional incentives—is a crucial premise of this book. Corporate responsibility, as Freese defines it, is the idea that companies have “some responsibility beyond increasing profits”—that “corporate leaders” ought to “expand their horizon of responsibility to consider the welfare of the economy and community broadly.” The problem with corporate social responsibility, however, is that it is essentially self-regulating. Corporate accountability, on the other hand, which requires us to build power in a way that corporate responsibility does not, means having control over policy such that standards for corporate behavior can be monitored, regulated, and enforced if and when companies cause harm.
What might, in Industrial Strength Denial, be a full-throated call for corporate accountability, given the long and sordid history of corporate denial, is instead somewhat of a meek bleating that we should “try to imagine how [social norms] might be shifted to advance the greater good.” “The exact nature of a corporation’s social responsibility will always be hard to define,” she writes, “but it surely helps if executives at least accept that they have some responsibility beyond increasing profits.” She mentions that her search to understand the motivations behind corporate denialism does not mean “abandoning the push for accountability,” but also seems to bring to the table a basic faith in the goodness of businessmen’s hearts—that they would do “the right thing” if only the corporate cultural context rewarded it—on which we cannot rely. In addition, throughout Industrial Strength Denial, there is a marked absence of attention to and analysis of power structures within the industries she discusses, particularly when it comes to the oil and gas companies. Freese’s cast of characters consists primarily of white-collar executives, scientists, lawyers, and government officials, but an executive at BP and an offshore oil rig worker in Lousiana do not share the same set of material calculations when it comes to investing in climate denial and, as Trish Kahle, Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni and others have argued, labor and the climate movement can, should and must be allies. Building such an alliance is complicated, but analyzing the psychology of the bosses doesn’t get us very far when it comes to understanding the needs and motivations of their workers. Yes, we need to change social norms. But the immediacy of the crisis that we are in demands that we first amass the power to change the rules of the game, and let the norms follow suit.
The fundamental weakness of the book, though, is that the existential threat of the climate crisis is not really akin to the dangers of smoking, much as we might have to learn about the tactics of corporate ad campaigns from Big Tobacco, and even though the chlorofluorocarbons that ate away at the ozone layer could have constituted a planetary threat, the author herself admits that “the companies that made CFCs…merely faced losing one of their many products and might profitably sell substitutes.” Fossil fuel companies, on the other hand, “[face] the prospect of the world mobilizing against the product at the core of their corporate existence…[the agreement to phase out CFCs] is not a good historical analogy for climate denial, because the stakes for the industry were so much lower.” The abolition of slavery, insofar as it constituted a direct attack on an established world order, is perhaps the closest analogy to the scale of the current fight. Freese ends her book with a call to revamp corporations, but this is not enough. We can’t just daydream about a shift in norms that would make corporate social responsibility the new normal; we need more—much more— in order to begin adequately addressing the climate crisis. We need a radical restructuring of production, consumption, and mobility, and we need corporate accountability more than we need corporate responsibility. It is well and good for corporations to behave benevolently because we succeed in changing the social norms and expectations around corporate behavior, but we cannot entrust the future of our planet to good intentions.
Emma Herman is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she studied history and philosophy. She is interested in the intersection of racial and environmental justice, with a particular focus on security and urban policy. She tweets @e_lherman.
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