Smoking is dangerous—and so are fossil fuels
It’s time for some fiction on this Substack account.
Let’s consider, for a moment, that there is a province in Canada with two major political parties who believe that the world needs to smoke more cigarettes.
They think that smoking a certain type of cigarette is less harmful, even though the manufacturing process for this brand makes it just as dirty as an unfiltered Camel.
Each of these parties is eager to create cigarette factories in the province to compete with those in other countries. Both parties endorse offering billions of dollars in government incentives to lure tobacco-product manufacturers.
These parties also don’t want to interrupt the shipment of cigarettes from a neighbouring province across their territory. Each knows that if it tries to do this, it will face fierce opposition from the federal government and the national and provincial media.
The right-wing party has friends in the business community who build and operate cigarette-export terminals. The left-wing party worries about a backlash from labour unions whose members build transportation networks for cigarettes to reach international markets.
When the right-wing party holds a leadership race, one candidate raises concerns about the amount of smoking in society. He worries that his party’s support for smoking might alienate younger voters, who are very opposed to tobacco consumption for health reasons.
This candidate is trounced, only attracting 5.8 percent of the party members’ support on the first ballot.
The two top vote-getters are vehement advocates for cigarette manufacturing and consumption. The runner-up repeatedly makes a point about how this benefits First Nations.
When the left-wing party holds a leadership race, it appoints a chief electoral officer who was a former lobbyist for communities hoping to attract a cigarette manufacturing plant to their region. This former lobbyist recommends cancelling the candidacy of a popular anti-smoker who’s seeking the party leadership.
The reason? A group representing anti-smokers encouraged its members to get involved in the leadership race to wean the province off its dependence on tobacco revenues. These members eagerly joined the left-wing party, hoping that their preferred candidate would address the health consequences of too much smoking. This was deemed to be against the rules.
The party executive—in this work of fiction—endorses the chief electoral officer’s recommendation, ensuring that the pro-smoking candidate faces no opposition and becomes premier.
It’s worth noting that smoking caused about 7.7 million deaths in 2019, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. But this goes unmentioned by the pro-smoking candidates in both parties’ leadership races.
There’s a third party in the province that remains hostile to smoking. It opposes offering government incentives to cigarette manufacturers and exporters.
In this part of Canada, it has little public support in the polls and is largely shut out of daily media coverage between elections.
Footnotes unrelated to cigarette manufacturing
The World Health Organization predicts that climate change will cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050. These five million additional deaths will be due to malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress.
“Reducing emissions of greenhouse gases through better transport, food and energy-use choices can result in improved health, particularly through reduced air pollution,” the WHO stated last year.
The WHO’s estimate is conservative in comparison to a 2012 report by DARA International, which anticipated that the annual death toll directly from climate change would reach nearly 700,000 per year by 2030.
"We have established that the decades-long blocking and lying about the scientific evidence on the dangers of human-caused global warming has been deliberate," Peter D. Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth wrote in their landmark 2018 book Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival. "So the question arises, how many people have been, or will be, hurt or killed by climate change?"
Coincidentally, Unprecedented Crime included a great deal of information about how the fossil-fuel industry has used tobacco-industry tactics to sow doubt about how dangerous their products are to human health.