Inspired by the acclaimed book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt takes audiences on a satirically comedic, yet illuminating ride into the heart of conjuring American spin. Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the curtain on a secretive group of highly charismatic, silver- tongued pundits-for-hire who present themselves in the media as scientific authorities – yet have the contrary aim of spreading maximum confusion about well-studied public threats ranging from toxic chemicals to pharmaceuticals to climate change.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Bob Inglis. Inglis was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1992, having never run for office before. He represented Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, from 1993-1998, unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Senator Fritz Hollings in 1998, and then returned to the practice of commercial real estate law in Greenville, S.C. In 2004, he was re-elected to Congress and served until losing re-election in the South Carolina Republican primary of 2010.

In 2011, Inglis went full-time into promoting free enterprise action on climate change and launched the Energy and Enterprise Initiative (“E&EI”) at George Mason University in July 2012. E&EI is a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt, educational outreach that lives to demonstrate the power of accountable free enterprise. E&EI believes that climate change can be solved by eliminating all subsidies, including the implicit subsidy of the lack of accountability for emissions. By creating a level playing field in which all costs are transparently “in” on all fuels, E&EI believes that the free enterprise system will deliver innovation faster than government regulations could ever imagine.

E&EI supports an online community of energy optimists and climate realists at republicEn.org. You can say you’re “En” on free enterprise solutions to climate change at republicEn.org.

For his work on climate change Inglis was given the 2015 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. He appears in the film Merchants of Doubt and in the Showtime series YEARS of Living Dangerously (episodes 3 and 4), and he spoke at TEDxJacksonville.

Inglis was a Resident Fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics in 2011, a Visiting Energy Fellow at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment in 2012, and a Resident Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics in 2014.

Read the Global Voices interview with Mr. Inglis here.

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Global Voices Lecture Series and The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (Twitter: @UChiEnergy).