The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 446
Cigarette ads courtesy of http://tobacco.stanford.edu/
The petroleum oil industry, the other nefarious harbinger of death, has taken
many pages from tobacco's advertising playbook, especially the use of doctors
to support their invented claims and pseudo-scientific research. The big difference is Big Oil's misuse of the "other" kind of doctors to advance their misinformation. Big Oil likes those with a Ph.D. or a JD after their name. When they find
an individual with both a Ph.D. and JD after their name it is better than striking
gold.
I'm not against people taking money from various interests to further their commercial goals; I'm just against the misuse of someone's academic or non-related credentials to make didactic statements about issues they know little or
nothing about. The oil industry, like the tobacco industry before them, uses the
public's virtual worship of the title "doctor" to try to silence any criticism. Unfortunately for the health and well-being of the world, it's working pretty good for
Big Oil, even though the Ph.D. and JD "doctors" they're using seem to be devoid
of any practical knowledge of ethanol production, internal combustion engines,
or day-to-day business.
I think it's more than an interesting coincidence that Ph.D. is the abbreviation
for "doctor of philosophy" - the word "philosophy" being the operative word. In
other words, they may understand the notion of the subject matter, but not its
hands-on application. Consider if you will the British legal system's two types of
lawyers: the solicitor and the barrister. And even in the medical field, there is
the difference between MDs who are consulting doctors and those who are
practicing surgeons. Or another way to look at it is the difference between those
