This Must Be Made Personal For Deniers
Amitav Ghosh's new book on yesterday's British opium trade links those crimes to those of the fossil fuels industry today
Two articles I read in today’s Financial Times combined in my mind to underscore the importance of ensuring that those guilty of truly systemic crimes are held to account—and that they pay heavy (and ideally personal) financial penalties.
The first was a review of Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, Smoke And Ashes, in which he concludes that: “No amount of sophistry can disguise the fact that the British empire’s opium racket was a criminal enterprise, utterly indefensible by the standards of its time as well as ours.” Those involved got away with it because the trade was, well, so lucrative
Ghosh draws uncomfortable parallels with both the Sackler family’s profiteering from the devastating opioid disaster, a story told in Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2021 book, Empire of Pain, and the corporate lobbying and influencing tactics of the fossil fuel industries today. Indefensible and, increasingly, likely to be criminalised.
The second article sported a self-explanatory title: “Climate scientist wins $1m damages in defamation case.” A University of Pennsylvania professor, Michael Mann, best known for his “hockey stick” graph predicting sharp rises in global temperature, was accused—baselessly—of data manipulation. And worse. Because the FT piece isn’t yet publicly online, here’s the story from The Guardian.
One of the rightwing bloggers in court was fined $1,000, the second $1,000,000. That’s more like it. Interestingly, too, one of the defendants was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think-tank. When my then company SustainAbility opened a Washington, D.C. office, it was in a building where we occupied one side and the CEI the other.
It always struck me as a bit like matter and anti-matter butting up against each other. Now it’s time to come down much harder on those who lie and vilify good people to defend the indefensible—and, increasingly, to hold those most culpable personally liable to their last penny.