Jamais Cascio -- late of Worldchanging, now ensconced in a snug new blog home -- has an intriguing post up arguing that there are parallels between the climate-crisis debate and the smoking debate of yore, and furthermore that those pushing the climate-crisis issue have much to learn from anti-smoking advocates.
I think he's right on both counts. But I also think he's being rather optimistic about both the parallels and the lessons. Consider this:
But as the public grew more comfortable with the idea of a complex, long-term result from current behavior, and the evidence grew for the big-picture smoking-cancer connection -- even while the cause-and-effect for a given example could be no more certain -- the culture (in the US) shifted, and the cigarette industry lobbyists stopped trying to undermine the science and started trying to hold off lawsuits.
It's late, so I won't try to make this argument in any particularly nuanced way. Let me just say: I don't think the public became comfortable with complex, long-term results from current behaviors. I think individual members of the public became convinced -- not just intellectually, but viscerally -- that if they smoked, they would probably get lung cancer. The argument that swayed the public was as lizard-brain as you can get: you smoke, you die.
Did anti-smoking advocates mislead, either explicitly or implicitly, implying a more direct causal connection than was scientifically supported? Probably. But I can't help thinking some fudging on their part was justifiable, given the thousands, probably millions of lives saved thanks to the reduction in smoking. These transitions in public sentiment don't take place on a cognitive level. They are emotional, gut-level changes, and emotional, gut-level images and narratives drive them.
I doubt a sophisticated sense of risk analysis had anything to do with it.
Thus the problem for the climate-crisis crowd. The link between smoking and lung cancer is tenuous, but it is measurable. There is real individual danger, and within a comprehensible span of years. The link between emitting CO2 (by, say, driving) and a heat wave in Europe is orders of magnitude longer and more tenuous. And, crucially, the danger an individual faces from his or her own emissions of CO2 is basically negligible.
They are both, in some sense, collective action problems. But the dangers of cigarette smoking are vastly more immediate, more quantifiable, and more personal than the dangers of emitting CO2. Vastly.
And we don't just have to do what anti-smoking advocates did. We have to do something 100 times larger, with fewer emotional tools available, much, much faster.
Crap, now I've depressed myself.
Comments
View as Flat
LindaG Posted 5:11 pm
04 May 2006
I read this in Dr. Jeff Master's Wunderblog a week or so ago... I found this to be a real help to me personally (a non-science layperson, who has been struggling with how to find my way through all that is being said about global warming - and there have been a lot of prominent dismissals of the issue lately by several prominent opinion pieces - George Will, etc. How am I, Jane Blow, supposed to counter such things?... Oh, and partly prompted by such concerns, within this past couple of weeks, I've now begun to work with some others - hooked up with a few folks who know science well - to do just that, by the way... wish us well...)
--------------------
Within a larger essay responding to an opinion piece in the WSJ, Dr. Jeff Masters had this to say:
Flashback to 1974
On June 28, 1974, Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina, chemists at the University of California, Irvine, published the first scientific paper warning that human-generated chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) could cause serious harm to Earth's protective ozone layer. They calculated that if CFC production continued to increase at the going rate of 10%/year until 1990, then remain steady, CFCs would cause a global 5 to 7 percent ozone loss by 1995 and 30-50% loss by 2050.
They warned that the loss of ozone would significantly increase the amount of skin-damaging ultraviolet UV-B light reaching the surface, greatly increasing skin cancer and cataracts. The loss of stratospheric ozone could also significantly cool the stratosphere, potentially causing destructive climate change. Although no stratospheric ozone loss had been observed yet, CFCs should be banned, they said. At the time, the CFC industry was worth about $8 billion in the U.S., employed over 600,000 people directly, and 1.4 million people indirectly (Roan, 1989).
Critics and skeptics--primarily industry spokespeople and scientists paid by conservative think tanks--immediately attacked the theory. Despite the fact that Molina and Rowland's theory had wide support in the scientific community, these handful of skeptics, their voices greatly amplified by the public relations machines of powerful corporations and politicians sympathetic to them, succeeded in delaying imposition of controls on CFCs for over a decade. Scientists who advocated CFC controls were accused of being alarmists out to get research funding. One CFC industry magazine stated in 1975, "The whole area of research grants and the competition among scientists to get them must be considered a factor in the politics of ozone" (Roan, 1989).
DuPont, which made 1/4 of the world's CFCs, spent millions of dollars running full-page newspaper advertisements defending CFCs in 1975, claiming there was no proof that CFCs were harming the ozone layer. The chairman of DuPont commented that the ozone depletion theory was "a science fiction tale...a load of rubbish...utter nonsense." (Chemical Week, 16 July 1975). The aerosol industry also launched a PR blitz, issuing a press release stating that the ozone destruction by CFCs was a theory, and not fact. This press release, and many other 'news stories' favorable to industry, were generated by the aerosol industry and printed by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune magazine, Business Week, and the London Observer (Blysky and Blysky, 1985). The symbol of Chicken Little claiming that "The sky is falling!" was used with great effect by the PR campaign, and appeared in various newspaper headlines.
The CFC industry companies hired the world's largest public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, who organized a month-long U.S. speaking tour in 1975 for noted British scientist Richard Scorer, a former editor of the International Journal of Air Pollution and author of several books on pollution. Scorer blasted Molina and Rowland, calling them "doomsayers", and remarking, "The only thing that has been accumulated so far is a number of theories."
Sound familiar?
In a 1984 interview in The New Yorker, Rowland concluded, "Nothing will be done about this problem until there is further evidence that a significant loss of ozone has occurred. Unfortunately, this means that if there is a disaster in the making in the stratosphere we are probably not going to avoid it." The very next year, all the "Chicken Little" scientists were proved right, when the Antarctic ozone hole was discovered. Human-generated CFCs were indeed destroying Earth's protective ozone layer. In fact, the ozone depletion was far worse than Molina and Roland had predicted. No one had imagined that ozone depletions like the 50% losses being observed by 1987 over Antarctica were possible so soon. Despite the continued opposition of many of the skeptics, the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to phase out ozone-destroying chemicals, was hurriedly approved in 1987 to address the threat. By 2003, it appeared that the ozone hole had stopped growing, thanks to the quick action. Molina and Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995. The citation from the Nobel committee credited them with helping to deliver the Earth from a potential environmental disaster..."
See full post here:
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=341&tstamp=200604
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 8:04 am
06 May 2006
In fact, I never smoked, so that sentence-plus-parenthetical-remark means little or nothing to me. But my husband used to smoke a lot, and misses it, complains to our doctor that subsequent to quitting he has gained a lot of weight.
He quit, in the first place, not for self-regarding, health-related reasons at all. He knows his statistics, and has a degree in public health, and is not convinced by the connexions with lung cancer or cardiovascular disease. No, he quit because of me -- I asked him to quit. And because of everyone else that he came into contact with.
It was a funny stretch of etiquette, for decades in the past, that while on the one hand a guest in someone's home who wanted to smoke would ask, "Do you mind if I smoke?," (and usually the host would not only have no objection, but would actually have an ash tray at hand), on the other hand a person in a restaurant would never think it necessary to get the permission of people at neighboring tables before lighting up. And in most parts of the world, from what I am told, that etiquette still prevails.
Nevertheless, at least in this country, the sense of etiquette changed, and I do not think it had much to do with self-regarding interest in one's own personal health. Remember the time when smokers in restaurants would be glared at (minimally; 10 points), or be cursed and vituperated (25 points), or be soaked with a glass (50 points) or pitcher (100 points) of ice water. (There is an anecdote about Dr. Joyce Brothers, everyone's favorite shrink once upon a time, on an airplane, needing to use her vomit bag, then stormily throwing it at the smoker whose smoke so upset her.)
So with "climate crisis" and our energy consumption. Sorry, but I have a very hard time understanding people who will make decisions about such things solely with regard to how the problems affect them personally.
While I do not condone the tactics of our Joyce-Brothers-ish eco-terrorist anti-hero Jeff Luers, languishing in prison, I do think he can inspire us, say, to target SUVs in a less destructive way. E.g.: Whatever happened to the campaign to slap mocking bumper-stickers on parked SUVs? You know, "I'm changing the climate! (Ask me how!)" Energy consumption is of course a huge and complex thing; but surely it is not bad to start with what we drive, how we drive, how much we drive, and insisting that those are truly moral considerations.
Permalink
Tina Rhea Posted 4:19 am
07 May 2006
But CFCs were produced by a small number of companies, though they were large and influential. CO2 and other climate-changing gases are being produced daily not only by industry-- pretty much ALL industries-- but also by everyone who drives a car, burns wood, or uses most forms of electricity.
Garrett Hardin, in a classic essay, called it "The Tragedy of the Commons"-- adding to the problem makes my future or my children's future a little worse, but it enhances our lives right now by what seems like a lot more, so we all keep on doing it until the system crashes.
I would love it if the campaign against climate change could be as successful as quickly as the campaign against CFCs, but the targets are vastly more diffuse.
See Hardin's article at, among other sources, http://dieoff.org/page95.htm, or a Wikipedia summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons .
Permalink
LindaG Posted 3:44 pm
07 May 2006
The point, however, as discussed by Elizabeth Kolbert, too (which I just learned while listening to the audio version on my computer while reading your reply - some timing, huh?), in her new book Field Notes from a Catastrophe is how similar the campaign against the science was (and how successful it was for quite a long time - and, by no means, did the resolution occur quickly). And the effects are still occurring and will be over at least the next half-century.
Also, like global warming, the effects described were not easily grasped in the every day lives of individuals, which was certainly a big part of the difficulty for scientists advocating for change.
A more extensive essay by Jeff Masters on the campaign of the CFC industry against the science of the day is described here:
http://www.wunderground.com/education/ozone_skeptics.asp
For an analogy to be an effective analogy, it doesn't have to be a perfect one. So I would disagree with such an easy dismissal.
The key is to learn from them, to understand that very similar campaigns against science (especially science that "inconveniently intrudes" upon deeply entrenched habits that are a daily part of our lives and that are the foundation of at least some of our current industries, which, in turn, supply the jobs for many of our citizens, etc.) have occurred before.
And knowing these examples in some depth can help us put things in better perspective as we see the same thing occuring now. They help us to see that the emperor fairly often has no clothes...
I do agree that as extensive as that problem was, as deeply as it wedged itself into everyday life, and as much as it affected industry, it pales in comparison to how the whole of fossil fuels underly just about every aspect of modern life and industry (so that no analogy is, of course, truly apt in this case).
But that too can be helpful, along the lines of...
...see what happened - what the level of resistance and denial was, particularly from industry - when a single treasured pearl was at steak? what do you think that means for a time when a whole treasure bag of pearls are at steak?
Here's to us all...
LindaG
Permalink
bookerly Posted 8:21 pm
07 May 2006
Comparing global warming to smoking is like comparing hurricanes to putting a needle in your arm.
The nature of each, and the kinds of campaigns neccessary (derived from the nature) are different.
Smoking is injurious to people's health. It involves products that are accessories to everyday life, marketed effectively by a few corporations. The raw material was produced by a relatively small number of farmers, most of whom produced other things as well.
As the science mounted, several things began to happen. One, advertising for cigarettes was banned. We tend to forget the power of advertising (some of which was designed by behavioral psychologists) to convince us to do things. Removing advertising as a support for smoking took away a critical part of the ability of cigarette manufacturers to capture new customers.
Two, warning labels were added to packages. This amounted to advertising against smoking.
Three, prices were raised, a lot. Every time prices went up, a few more people quit smoking. Price increases were a major support for people trying to quit.
Four, anti-smoking advertising was effective. California dropped it's smoking rate among young people considerably with a tough anti-smoking advertising campaign (which was gutted by Republicans).
Five, law suits and local legislation make tobacco companies attractive targets for money.
Why not do the same for global warming?
First of all, as several people have point out, the effects are not as clearly immediate. If I smoke, I get sick, I cough. I can feel it is bad for me. If I drive a car, I feel good, I feel powerful, I feel free.
Secondly, the industries involved in global warming are many, and are more deeply tied into the economy. Cigarettes are peripheral, cars and power plants are central.
Thirdly, convincing individuals to stop something peripheral to their lives could have an overall effect. Changing global warming involves changing not only individual behavior, but also addressing institutional behavior (government, industry, the military, churches, schools, NGO's, and anything else I may have forgotten).
So, the path for a campaign against global warming is different. Frankly the science has been clear for a number of years. Only in the United States is the science questioned. The rest of the world "gets it".
The path towards stopping global warming includes massive changes in manufacturing, transportation, power generation and life style.
All of these are possible, but the demand is lacking.
As to the Tragedy of the Commons, Hardin should have called it the "Tragedy of the Americans". The individualistic nature of American society seems to prevent people from working together for the common good.
In China, parents make tremendous sacrifices for the future of their children and family. Hardin was blinded by his ethnocentricism.
The irony is we have the technology (or are so close to it that it is a matter of engineering (which requires money spent on developement) rather than science (requiring new discoveries).
patrick
Permalink
kmp Posted 5:17 am
12 May 2006
Story here.
Listen to the audio - it's fairly hilarious.
Permalink
zaximka Posted 7:33 pm
18 Oct 2006
wanted effects, probably "obtaining rewards" motivation can make a difference. As an example, not so long ago anti-smoking pills were discovered to increase libido. May be we could kill two birds with one stone and begin to tackle birth-rate problems?
Permalink