Thank You For Smoking

A couple of weeks ago, for no particular reason, I made an off-the-cuff musing on my Tastytrade show about the prospect, years from now, of the giant oil companies being dragged in front of some kind of world court, being called to account (and pay for) all the damage they have done to the world’s climate. Again, I’m not sure what possessed me to say something so random, but I was naturally struck when I saw these headlines this evening:

See, the thing is, if global warming does become a real problem down the road, the world as a whole is going to be pretty pissed off, and we humans always need Someone To Blame when things go sour (sort of how I’m hoping Bernanke and Yellen are hung upside-down on crosses in my lifetime, but I digress). And the someone-to-blame would be the big boys like Chevron and Exxon.

And the hatred they face would be much worse than what the tobacco companies faced with respect to the lung cancer. See, the situation is similar……both industries had been researching their prospective “problems” for decades, and they reached the same conclusions (smoking causes cancer/burning crude oil causes global warming) and then (I’m highly confident) hid the results.

The tobacco companies have shelled out zillions in jury awards, but so many people around the world are addicted to nicotine, the firms are still thriving better than ever. With oil companies, though, they’re not going to get the same “pass” that tobacco companies did (which, to be specific, is this: the smokers were partly responsible for their own poor choice to light up in the first place, but automobile drivers pretty much had no alternative).

Of course, as with tobacco, you can expect decades of denial from Big Oil, but how amusing it would be to see them dragged through the same mud that tobacco firms had been (and, unlike that situation, the plaintiff will people The People Of Earth instead of Joe Two-Pack).