Kicking cigarettes as tough as kicking fossil fuels

Are you a smoker who is trying to stop? Or are you helping a loved one kick their tobacco habit? Whether you've quit or tried to get someone else to, it is almost certainly because you know that smoking is unhealthy.

The link between smoking and cancer was brought to national attention in the first Surgeon General's report in 1964. In a generation, we went from accepting smoking as a social norm to understanding its dangers and trying to devise solutions— such as medical approaches to quitting and policy aimed at protecting people from secondhand smoke.

Along the way, the tobacco industry spent a great deal of money trying to discredit the science. When evidence became irrefutable, they protested the loss of farm income in the South and the size and frequency of required warning labels.

We are facing a similar scenario with climate change and the fossil fuel industry has much deeper pockets than the tobacco industry. But despite the noise of a vocal minority, scientific consensus on climate change is stronger than the consensus that led to the Surgeon General's report on smoking. It will be just as hard to kick our addiction to fossil fuels as it is to kick an addiction to cigarettes.

Carbon dioxide is not just an odorless, colorless, non-toxic gas. Rapid changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have real effects on this planet, including sea level rise and threats to our agriculture and human health. It's time to acknowledge the scientific consensus and address the changes that global warming is already bringing.

"Earth Wise" is heard on WAMC Northeast Public Radio and is supported by the Cary Institute.