There is No Evidence That Cigarettes Cause Global Warming
There is a renewed interest in vintage tobacco advertising and, more importantly, vintage tobacco company stooges. The reason for this fascination is that people are making very plausible analogies between the tone, the content and the tactics of the tobacco industry and what we are hearing from the fossil fuel industry today.
Cigarettes cause cancer.
I find it to be an amazing coincidence that decades of studies funded by the tobacco industry failed to make that link while studies funded by the government were gathering an insurmountable body of evidence that tobacco does cause cancer.
With the question of global warming, the government is to some degree on the side of industry. Many politicians seem to think that getting elected is their job and that governing is just a smörgåsbord of perks. By any reasonable estimate, widespread disastrous consequences to global warming will be more than four years away for a long time.
There are two scary things about making this analogy between the tobacco and global warming. The first is trying to imagine what would constitute an insurmountable body of evidence related to global warming. The second is the fact that people are still smoking.
