Remember when it used to be okay to smoke a cigarette just about anywhere you pleased. You could light up in theatre lobbies, restaurants, public buildings, and nobody would ask you to butt out, because smoking was a right.
Then the facts started coming in about how bad smoking was to our health, and how harmful second-hand smoke was to the people around us.
All of a sudden it became not-so-cool to smoke. Cigarette ads were not allowed anymore; ugly pictures of people afflicted with cancer appeared on cigarette packs; the habit was banned in an ever increasing list of public spaces.
We declared all-out war on an addiction that was seen to be harmful to individuals and costly to society.
So what’s the difference between second hand smoke, and the damage being done to our environment and us by the carbon dioxide being blown into our atmosphere by millions of cars burning fossil fuels
Surely second hand CO2 is even more dangerous and likely to have more far-reaching and devastating consequences than cigarette smoke ever did – bad as cigarette smoke was and is.
Why, then, do we not have government funded campaigns in place discouraging the use of fossil fuels? Why are we not taxing gas at the pumps to achieve two objectives: raise the cost of CO2 to consumers and thereby discourage use; and derive revenues that can be used to research and develop alternatives?
The answer, of course, is that any political party that too aggressively advocated such a program would almost certainly plummet to the bottom of the polls.
That doesn’t mean more can’t be done to shift people’s attitudes and provide alternatives to fossil fuels. It’s not good enough to say consumers the world over want carbon based fuels, therefore we should make the most of it rather than letting other producers cash in on the bonanza.
We have to expect more from our leaders than that.
