Climate policy: lessons from tobacco control
The Lancet has an important article on comparing the current efforts to implement a climate policy, with tobacco control.
While tobacco smoking has been scientifically shown to cause illnesses, it took a substantial amount of time of fifty years to implement a tobacco control policy. Still, nowdays smoking kills over 5 million people each year, with an estimated overall death of more than 100 million people.
The tobacco industry, through an effective campaign, managed to avoid control by undermining the scientific results and injecting doubt in the science.
Though it was shown that smoking causes health problems in the 1950s, only in 2005 did the World Health Organisation (WHO) bring into force the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
We covered recently the book Doubt is their product on the efforts of the tobacco and other industries to delay regulations for products that are harmful to the health and the environment.
Read the full article Climate policy: lessons from tobacco control (requires free registration to TheLancet).
Reference: The Lancet, Volume 374, Issue 9706, Pages 1955 – 1956, 12 December 2009 – doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61959-0