Herbert Morawetz Distinguished Lecture: How Free Market Thinking Has Blocked Climate Action

Naomi Oreskes

Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science
Harvard University

Abstract:

The world has known for decades that man-made climate change threatens our health, our wealth, and even the future on life on Earth as we know it. Yet, despite hundreds of major scientific reports, thousands of peer-reviewed articles, and a near unanimous consensus among climate scientists, political and social action has been inadequate to address the unfolding crisis. Worse, many American political leaders continue to deny that there even is a climate crisis. In our first book, Merchants of Doubt, Erik Conway and I showed that climate change denial was rooted in market fundamentalism: the belief that government action in the marketplace threatens personal freedom and puts us on the “road to serfdom.” In our new book, we show how market fundamentalism — linked to the rhetorical framework of the threat of “Big Government” — was cultured, advanced, and sustained by powerful American business interests, and how this political ideology continues today to be a major force blocking climate (and other important political) action today.

Speaker Bio:

Naomi Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She is an internationally renowned earth scientist, historian, and author of both scholarly and popular books and articles on the history of earth and environmental science, including most recently, Why Trust Science? (2019) and Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean (2021), which was awarded the Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science by the American Philosophical Society. Her opinion pieces have been published in leading media outlets around the globe, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times (London), and the Frankfurter Allgemeine. In 2015, she wrote the Introduction to the Melville House edition of the Papal Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, Laudato Si.

Professor Oreskes is a leading voice on the reality of anthropogenic climate change and the history of efforts to undermine climate action. Her 2004 essay “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” (Science 306: 1686) has been widely cited, including in the Royal Society’s publication, “A Guide to Facts and Fictions about Climate Change," and in the Academy-award winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. Her 2010 book with Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt, has been translated into nine languages, sold over 100,000 copies, and made into a documentary film. She is an elected fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2018, she became a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2019 was awarded the British Academy Medal for “her commitment to documenting the role of corporations in distorting scientific findings for political ends.” In 2024, she was awarded the Nonino Foundation “Maestro del Nostro Tempo” award, and in 2025, the Volvo Environment Prize for her contributions in “shaping our understanding of how scientific knowledge is collectively constructed and addressing the challenges of misinformation in public discourse.” Her latest book, with Erik Conway, is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loath Government and Love the Free Market, which has been translated to French and Italian.