Waste and Manufacturing Doubt

Spencer Schillerstrom                                                                                                                                      1/7/15

Blog 3: Waste and Manufacturing Doubt

            After learning a lot about incinerators from the past two days of reading, I made a strange connection between the incinerator ‘movement’ and large product pushes of the past. Reading all the articles, it seemed fairly obvious to me that the incinerator push is obviously not a benefit to society. It is not only wasteful and dangerous, but it is a profit driven endeavor that does not contribute to the sustainable lifestyle that we all must work towards. I don’t know about you, but this description sounds very familiar to me. It’s almost as if the incinerator movement is like a new tobacco industry!

            So if the incinerator movement is so obviously a step in the wrong direction, much like the smoking of tobacco a few years back, why do people still accept it? The explanation for this is clearly illustrated by D. Michaels in a chapter of his book Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance entitled “Manufactured Uncertainty.” In this chapter, Michael describes the practice of producing doubt as a way to defend profits and keep the public from making a decision about the company or movement. For example, the Tobacco Industry did a great job of debating science over ethics, picking and choosing which studies to examine, laundering their information so it seems like it is wide spread, and even taking past studies and making them look insignificant. All of these strategies prevented people from finding a definite reason as to why they should stop smoking. In other words, the Tobacco Industry manufactured just as much doubt as they did tobacco.

            The incinerator movement is very similar to this situation in many ways. As mentioned in the readings, incinerator supporting companies and groups will make advertisements and testimonies illustrating waste incineration as a renewable resource by calling it a “waste-to-energy” system. People read these testimonies as if they are from independent academic sources. In reality, however, the public is receiving indirect information from the incinerator supporting companies themselves! The incinerator supporting companies are manufacturing uncertainty to the public so they will continue to support the incinerator movement. On top of all of this, incinerator facilities often “fudge” their pollution and dioxin readings using various strategies such as combing the fly and bottom ash to alter results. This creates even more hesitation by the public to fight for change.

            Working past this doubt is often very hard to do, but it is very possible. Companies that successfully produce doubt make it very difficult for the truth to become known in the public through a constant flow of criticism. It takes education and confidence in order to sort through which criticisms are genuine and which are aimed at instilling even more doubt, but it can be done. It is true, however, that science today is much more advanced than it was when the tobacco industry was booming. We know with a great amount of certainty that incinerators are not helpful in achieving a sustainable lifestyle. I am hopeful because of this technology that the human race will work past this uncertainty much more quickly than in the past.