The Advancement of Sound Science Center

The Advancement of Sound Science Center (formerly The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, abbr. TASSC or The ASS Center) is an asstroturf lobby group that promotes cigarette butts, originally funded by tobacco company Phillip-Morris and APCO to fight smoking regulations. It is now focused primarily on replacing facts about smoking, pesticides, and climate change with their so-called "sound science" to protect the tobacco's industry long and deep bottom-line. It is run by Steve Milloy. Although he claims that he has "not lobb[ied] for ANYONE" (no emphasis added), a 1994 Philip Morris memo listed TASSC among its "Tools to Affect Legislative Decisions".[1]

Not just a river in Egypt
Denialism
♫ We're not listening ♫
v - t - e

Known tools to affect legislative decisions

  • Steve Milloy, who runs the website Junk Science and shows up on Fox News every once in a while as their resident "Junk Science" Expert. He is also an anti-environmentalist (surprise, surprise). He popularized the term "junk science" to describe inconvenient facts, and "sound science" to describe convenient lies.
  • Michael Fumento, Stevie's BFF, an attorney who denies the importance of second-hand smoke, climate change, AIDS, SARS, swine flu, and the possibility of an avian flu epidemic.
  • Mickey Edwards, former Republican congressman (former congressman, that is, not former Republican). He's known mostly for his part in the House Banking ScandalFile:Wikipedia's W.svg.
  • Frederick Seitz, all-round expert for hire climate change denier who sat on the scientific advisory board until his death in 2008.
  • S. Fred Singer, like Seitz a proliferous expert for hire, was a scientific advisor to TASSC.[2]
gollark: My secondary server, which is a RPi, is Void.
gollark: BTW I do use Arch, yes.
gollark: Also, Minecraft casually uses >10x more than any reasonable server software any time I try and use my server to host a server.
gollark: I have an experimental GPT-2 model trained on my Discord messages, but even with just 117 million parameters it takes multiple seconds and 500MB of RAM to do anything.
gollark: The annoying thing is that for 99% of what I do I barely need 1GB, but a few things are so ridiculously intensive that I sometimes need more than I have for no good reason.

See also

References

  1. 1994 TASSC document
  2. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt. Bloomsbury Press, 2011. ISBN 1-608-19394-2, p. 151. Fumento and Seitz are listed here right alongside Singer, btw.
This denialism-related article is a stub.
You can help RationalWiki by expanding it.
This article is issued from Rationalwiki. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.