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SUMMARY:Giant Power: energy technology and the long history of post-truth 
 - Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University)
DTSTART:20180516T120000Z
DTEND:20180516T133000Z
UID:TALK99253@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Agnes Bolinska
DESCRIPTION:In 2016\, the Oxford English Dictionary named 'post-truth' its
  word of the year\, defining it as 'relating to or denoting circumstances 
 in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion th
 an appeals to emotion and personal belief'\, the Oxford Dictionary provide
 d a useful addition to our vocabulary. Yet in the history of science and t
 echnology one can find many examples of attempts to undermine facts that t
 hreaten social or economic interests\, as well as of appeals to emotion an
 d belief to support those interests. In this paper\, I explore an early 20
 th century example: the campaign by the National Electric Light Associatio
 n (NELA) to undermine political support in the United States for publicly 
 generated and distributed electric power.\n\nBy the 1920s\, the private se
 ctor was providing electricity to millions of urban customers in the USA\,
  but rural Americans had been left mostly unserved. Elsewhere in the world
 \, including Germany\, Canada and New Zealand\, government involvement in 
 the marketplace had ensured that electricity reached rural as well as urba
 n customers. In response to this situation\, Pennsylvania governor Gifford
  Pinchot proposed 'Giant Power'\, a plan to pool electricity under the gui
 dance of state government to ensure that all citizens received power at a 
 fair price. Pinchot and other advocates of this plan noted that in Canada\
 , just a few miles away\, electricity was not only more extensively delive
 red\, but also cost less.\n\nIn response\, NELA sponsored a major propagan
 da campaign designed to discredit public power by insisting that privately
  generated electricity was cheaper and more reliable than municipal- or st
 ate-run electricity\, and that public power was socialistic and un-America
 n. This campaign involved advertising\, editorials in newspapers (many gho
 st-written)\, the re-writing of textbooks\, and the development of school 
 and university curricula designed to extol the virtues of laissez-faire ca
 pitalism and demonize government intervention in the marketplace. The camp
 aign worked in part by finding\, cultivating and paying experts to endorse
  the industry claims and cast doubt on factual information supplied by ind
 ependent third parties. It also appealed to emotion – love of country 
 – and fear – fear of communism. I conclude by suggesting that our curr
 ent state of affairs is not as novel as the OED suggests\, and that we may
  learn from the lessons of history on how to identify and address 'non-tru
 th' claims.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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