The current edition of the New York Review of Books includes a review of Allan M. Brandt’s The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America. One paragraph jumped out at me (the article is only available to subscribers of the electronic version, and is not even available to us print subscribers-so no link). The reviewer first asks why smoking rates climbed when the truth about smoking’s grave risk to health were beyond question. He immediately answers the question:
In response to the studies of Doll and Hill and Wynder and Graham, the tobacco companies issued in 1953 a “Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” which was published in newspapers across the country. The statement claimed that cigarettes were not “injurious to health,” but taht more research into the question was needed. At the same time, the industry endowed a new Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) whose purpose was to create the impression that the industry took the health issues seriously. In fact, the TIRC was mainly a public relations outfit. It funded scientists willing to question the evidence linking smoking and cancer and publicized their “findings.” The scientists used their grants to search for causes of cancer other than cigarettes, such as genetics and the environment, and they searched for beneficial effects of smoking. When some industry-funded scientists found evidence that cigarette smoke was loaded with carcinogens, their results were repressed. None of these scientists complained, and it was only in the 1980s that a small number of tobacco industry “whistle-blowers” came forward. Meanwhile, for decades, the TIRC continued to issue such statements as “There is no conclusive scientific proof of a link between smoking and cancer.”
It would be the work of a day (but I don’t have a day, so I’m not going to do it, but take my word) to find parallels with the corporate response to global warming, except, perhaps, for the whistle-blowers, whose time has not yet come. This historical precedent should give us more than pause. For all its evil, the harm that cigarettes did was largely restricted to those that used them. Not so with global warming. The stakes are far higher now, yet it may be that the forces of truth will have a more difficult time now than then. The cigarette industry was largely alone in trying to suppress the truth; not so today. Again, the cigarette industry had to swim against the current of a political system dominated in the legislature by liberal Democrats and courts that were trending left. So far the Democrats have responded to global warming in no more than a halfhearted way, and the Supreme Court is now clearly a tool of the corporate interests. What are the odds that we will do something effective about global warming in time to make a difference, given the institutional barriers we face.
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