How They Made Us Doubt Everything: 1. Big Oil's Big Crisis
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 29 July 2020
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From climate change to smoking and cancer, this is the story of how doubt has been manufactured.
In this episode we take you to an oil company’s boardroom as they plan their response to the ‘crisis mentality’ that was emerging after the long hot summer of 1988. 5,000 people died in the heat wave, coinciding with the moment NASA scientist Jim Hansen announced that a ‘greenhouse effect’ was ‘changing our climate now’. This looked like a battle for the survival of the oil industry.
This 10 part series explores how powerful interests and sharp PR managers engineered doubt about the connection between smoking and cancer and how similar tactics were later used by some to make us doubt climate change. With the help of once-secret internal memos, we take you behind boardroom doors where such strategies were drawn up and explore how the narrative changed on one of the most important stories of our time - and how the marketing of doubt has undermined our willingness to believe almost everything.
Producer: Phoebe Keane for BBC Radio 4 Presenter: Peter Pomerantsev
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:35.0 | BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts. |
| 0:39.0 | Welcome to Seriously. |
| 0:41.0 | I'm Peter Pomerantseev, |
| 0:42.0 | and today you're getting the first episode of my new series, |
| 0:45.2 | How They Made a Stout, everything. |
| 0:47.8 | You can hear the full 10-part series on sounds, search for how they made a doubt. |
| 0:53.0 | Everything. |
| 0:54.0 | For now, here it is. It wasn't even noon today when the temperature at Sioux Falls in South Dakota was over a hundred. |
| 1:05.0 | In Georgia a woman died from heat stroke while she was working in a tobacco field. The heat wave |
| 1:14.0 | continues over much of the nation and the heat wave alert continues here at the weather channel. |
| 1:19.0 | First of all, we'll start off with some record highs popping up over the country already Baltimore 101 degrees. |
| 1:25.0 | It's 1988 and it's the hottest summer on record. |
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