Barbara Freese

Barbara Freese is an environmental attorney who came to the subject of organised denial through a routine piece of state work. In the 1990s she was working for the state of Minnesota when it passed a law instructing utility regulators to estimate the environmental cost of generating electricity.

Most of the state's power came from coal, so the analysis began with coal emissions and with the conventional pollutants the state had regulated for decades. Her client was the Pollution Control Agency, so she knew that material well. The unfamiliar part was carbon dioxide and its effect on climate, which states had simply not looked at even though there was already a global treaty on the subject.

we struck a nerve with the coal industry

What followed was not a technical dispute. The industry sent witnesses to Minnesota to argue that the entire question was unnecessary.

The scientists the industry brought in testified that climate change was not going to happen, or that if it did it would be small and pleasant. Their other move was to discredit the mainstream: the panel the rest of the world relied on, including the US government and the treaty signed by George H. W. Bush, was described as biased, motivated by grants or politics. Freese notes that the accusation was vague but the purpose was clear — to stop anyone worrying about the issue at all.

it wasn't going to happen

Asked what “a little and you would like it” actually meant, she lists two arguments that are still in circulation. The first is that carbon dioxide is plant food, which is true as far as it goes, and therefore that more of it is good for everybody. One coal interest went further and produced a video arguing that the planet was short of carbon dioxide and that digging up coal and burning it was a correction.

CO2 is a plant fertilizer, which is true

the earth was deficient in CO2

The second argument was local flattery: warming would be mild, winters would be gentler, and Minnesota of all places should welcome it. Freese's point is not that these claims were exotic. It is that they have not gone away, and that in many respects the repertoire has got worse.

it'll be mild, it'll be warm, the winters won't be as cold

Joe Rogan asks whether this was her first exposure to corporations sending people in to muddy an argument. She declines the flattering version of the question — she was not that naive — but says she had never seen anything like it. What struck her was the setting: sworn testimony, extreme claims, and credentials.

these were people under oath

The witnesses were not coal company employees. They were hired by the industry to testify, and the ones she cross-examined were mainly scientists.

On motive, she is precise about what a litigator can and cannot establish. They were able to put into the record how much money various witnesses had received from fossil fuel interests over the years, and they argued from that. What they did not know at the time was how deep one witness's history ran.

That witness was Frederick Seitz, a prominent physicist who had worked on the Cold War weapons programme and who, after retiring from his main scientific work, spent a great deal of time consulting for the tobacco industry. Freese cross-examined him without knowing it, and says it would have been useful to bring up.

he had spent a lot of time actually consulting for the tobacco industry

The conversation turns to Merchants of Doubt, the film that brought Rogan to her work, and which traces how people who defended tobacco later defended other industries against science. Seitz fits the pattern with one complication: he arrived from physics and from weapons policy rather than from public relations.

Freese's summary of the film's subject is deliberately narrow — not a conspiracy of thousands, but a small, mobile group that moved from one regulated industry to the next.

this handful of scientists profiled in that movie

Rogan wants a psychological profile of these people, especially the tobacco ones, because the causal chain there is short and legible in a way the climate chain is not: a person smokes, a person gets cancer, and the industry said it did not come from cigarettes.

Freese answers the moral question first and then immediately complicates it. Yes, they were lying, and lying for money. But she wants to be careful about the word obvious, because the tobacco link only looks obvious in retrospect.

They're lying for money.

The delay between exposure and disease is what created the room for denial. The climate link, she argues, is just as well established — the difference is that the process is more complicated, the lag potentially longer, and the outcome partly depends on what humans choose to do in the meantime.

actually as well-established as the links between smoking and cancer

That is the analytical core of her book. Denial does not require a scientific controversy. It requires a gap in time wide enough for a plausible story.

She does not claim to psychoanalyse tobacco executives, but she does read what they said to each other. Internal documents and half-public statements show the shape of the rationalisation, and she opens the book with the most brazen example: a Philip Morris executive imagining what people would do without cigarettes.

who knows what you would do if you didn't smoke? Maybe you'd beat your wife. Maybe you'd drive cars fast.

The move is to construct a counterfactual in which the absence of the product produces something worse, and then to treat that imagined world as the relevant comparison. Freese's reading is that this is how the industry approached the whole problem, not as a lie told once but as a frame maintained for decades.

Rogan's follow-up is the obvious one: the executive in question quit. Freese confirms he quit fairly quickly, and the two of them leave the joke where it lands.

The scale is where the interview briefly stops being about rhetoric. Rogan asks how it feels to be the person who does this knowingly, and then answers his own question with arithmetic.

I don't know how many people have gotten cancer from cigarettes, but it's probably millions

Freese widens it: not only cancer, but heart disease and more. She cites an estimate for the twentieth century of roughly one hundred million deaths, and the current global toll, which she gives as seven million a year, with about 480,000 a year in the United States, traced as directly attributable.

It's 7 million a year, I think, is the global death toll.

She is careful to say that tobacco is the extreme case, the most famous one. The reason she keeps returning to it is that something much milder and much more ordinary happens inside almost any industry when it is accused of harm.

Her model of how denial starts is psychological before it is corporate. An accusation arrives. The people accused consult their own sense of themselves, and that sense clears them: they did not intend harm, therefore they do not feel guilty. From there the mind goes looking for reasons why the accusation must be wrong.

They check their gut, and their gut says, no, we didn't intend to cause harm.

The next stage is tribal. Freese's phrase is that these instincts sit barely below the surface for almost anyone, and that they are triggered rather than invented. The accusers must have an ulterior motive: money, power, attention, a political objective.

their tribal instincts, which are never more than just a millimeter below the surface

The other half of the tribal dynamic is self-flattery at scale. The industry is not merely selling a product; it is protecting freedom. Her comparison is deliberately provocative: the slave trade ran a full rescue narrative in which the trade was saving Africans from worse lives and delivering them to comfortable plantations.

Freese dates the modern repertoire to the British slave trade, which she identifies as the first really intense campaign of industrial denial she could find. Britain dominated the trade in the 1700s and then faced an abolition movement at the end of that century that went directly to the public with evidence, witnesses and the instruments of torture.

The slave trade had a complete rescue narrative.

What made the campaign effective was that it wounded a self-image. The British thought of themselves as civilised, freedom-promoting and humane, and the abolitionists were showing them otherwise. The industry responded by organising.

Traders and planters formed a slave lobby and ran a coordinated campaign. Freese stresses how broad the investment was — from the royal family to local bakers to many members of parliament — and therefore how legitimate the business looked to contemporaries.

it was a widely accepted, fully legitimate industry

The lobby could not simply deny the brutality; the abolitionists had the receipts. So it built a counter-narrative in which the trade was an act of rescue, and the enslaved were willing participants: eager to be purchased, demonstrating fitness for work, enjoying the crossing, singing and dancing and playing games.

we are rescuing these people

The destination was painted as comfort. Small houses, medical care, food, and a comparison that flattered the trade by insulting Britain's own poor.

It's like a cradle to grave welfare state.