This Climate One podcast is sponsored by General Motors.

How will we power our future? Can we create a healthy and clean economy?

Climate One at the Commonwealth Club is at the forefront of the global debate about energy, economy, and the environment.

Bringing together the brightest and most provocative leaders of our time,

Climate One is the place where big ideas get heard.

With thoughtful and insightful discussions on policy, business, science, and culture,

Climate One founder Greg Dalton gets to the heart of the matter.

It's our future. It's time to come together.

From the Commonwealth Club of California, this is Climate One, changing the conversation about America's energy, economy, and environment.

I'm Greg Dalton, and on the program today, we're talking about manufactured doubt.

Since the 1950s, a handful of people have been highly successful convincing Americans that smoking tobacco does not cause cancer

and burning fossil fuels may not heat the planet. As concern about global warming grew in the

1990s, the climate denial arguments took hold in American politics and they have ebbed and flowed

since. It's hard to remember now, but in 2008, presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama

both acknowledged that humans are changing the climate, and they had similar plans to fix it.

In 2015, Time magazine reported that only 16% of Americans said climate change is not real,

the lowest point since it started asking that question.

Now the election of Donald Trump has moved climate denial from the political fringe to the White House.

We'll hear about attacks on science in the second half of the program from former U.S. Secretary of Energy,

Steve Chu, who was a Nobel Prize-winning scientist.

We also will talk about when average Americans will see electric cars they can afford and other ways to grow and clean the

U.S. economy. First, we'll dig into the story of doubt with Naomi Oreskes. You might call her

...