I
am more than half way through the book The
Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
for Non-Fiction 2011, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Fourth Estate, ISBN
978-0-00-742805-2). The book tells you what cancer is; basically an intractable
enemy. The fight, actually the metaphor used is war on cancer, is described in much detail and over centuries, interspersed
with what one would call human interest stories including conflicts among
professionals, their jealousies and of course, money and governance. It is an
excellent read. I want to focus on a few pages, to be precise, a dozen pages
beginning with page number 250.
It
is in these pages we learn what the tobacco industry could do, and indeed did
to undermine every, repeat every, effort of the medical professionals over more
than four decades – sometimes suborning some professional turncoats – to bring
the tobacco industry to acknowledge its culpability in, if not foisting but, sustaining
lung cancer in the American population. As I read this segment, given in
such chilling details, tuned exclusively towards pursuit of profits by the industry, I
could not but make a connection between the current behavior of the hydrocarbon
industry and the continuing shenanigans of the tobacco industry. In this post,
I am taking faltering steps to delineate the parallels. Please do bear with me
if I overstep or trip; and, feel free to point out significant errors.
In
1954, the tobacco industry took a full page advertisement “simultaneously in
more than four hundred newspapers over a few weeks” and called it “A Frank
Statement”. This campaign, I would tag as the first instance of carpet bombing.
In the statement we read “We [tobacco industry] believe the products we make
are not injurious to health.” Two things you have to note. The industry is not
claiming that their product is not injurious. Their claim is they do not
believe that it is injurious. They are well within their rights to believe what
they want to believe. The other subterfuge is in the word “health”. The industry
is being taken to task for causing cancer. But by subsuming cancer within “health’,
the industry smeared the focus.
Are
there parallels to how the hydrocarbon industry treats climate change? How can
there not be? While global warming is the phenomenon, the focus is on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). You
will never see an advertisement by the oil companies mention AGW. It does not
have any problem acknowledging global warming as far as you do not even imply
that the major causal factor is humans burning fossil fuel. The fossil fuel
industry has not offered a single proof, even a tentative one, that exonerates
human activity in the established and ever steepening trend of increased levels
of carbon dioxide.
The
cigarette makers added “filters” to cigarettes to assure smokers that the “bad”
parts of smoke have been filtered out; what you take in is pure “goodness”!
Well, the oil industry has something equivalent. Yes, it is pumping out oil and
gas, but it is creating “green” space as compensation. For example, the oil
giant Shell had teamed up with The Economist and sponsored a series of essay competitions (ran for
a few years; I do not know whether it is still up and running) “to encourage
thinking and debate about the future”, and what is future if it is not
eco-consciousness? Can you say no to that logic? You see, the oil giant Shell is feeding your carbon dioxide
addiction but it is painting the world “Green” to absorb the emissions. The correspondence
between “filter tipped” cigarette and the “Green” initiatives of oil majors is
too obvious to be missed.
We
read in Mukherjee's book that the tobacco industry indulged in an “ingenious form of
manipulation” by gnawing “at science’s own self-doubt.” Quoting the industry
statement, “statistics purporting to link cigarette smoking with the disease
could apply with equal force to any one
of the many other aspects of modern life (my emphasis).” The equivalent
hydrocarbon lobby claims vis-à-vis global warming – earth’s orbit, the natural
cycle of warming and cooling of the globe over eons, sun spots … indeed
anything and everything that has nothing to do with fossil fuel burning.
Come
to “science‘s own (my emphasis) self-doubt”.
One detour. I think the author and also his editors missed this one: can
science’s self-doubt be anyone else’s? Why that own? Gotcha!
Getting
back on track, climate scientists (as distinct from skeptics) are too honest
for their own good. They talk in terms of probabilities but society demands
certainty. Science is never certain. This gap between the demand for certainty and
what science can supply is what the hydrocarbon business exploits, following
the trail blazed by tobacco companies. This is the current version of “ingenious
form of manipulation.”
The
tobacco industry sponsored a research committee, calling it “Tobacco Industry
Research Committee” whose head, Clarence Cook Little, was a contrarian –
refused to accept that smoking caused cancer despite all the adduced evidence.
Mukherjee paraphrases Little’s position memorably: “Blaming cigarettes for lung
cancer, then, was like blaming umbrellas for bringing on the rain”.
The
fossil fuel industry appears to be following this path. I have a tome (in the
true sense of the word, 750 oversized pages thick) that requests that it be cited
as follows: Craig Idso and S. Fred Singer, Climate
Change Reconsidered: 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on
Climate Change (NIPCC), Chicago, IL,: The Heartland Institute, 2009
(ISBN-13: 978-1-934791-28-8; ISBN-10: 1-934791-28-8). Its mandate, as evidenced
in the name, is to discredit IPCC, going full bore. It will be interesting to
note what the author Singer said about climate change: “[M]odels are very nice,
but they are not reality and they are not evidence.” But there is no mention what is the reality. I have established that
Little and Singer are birds of the same feather, the contrarian feathers!
I
have not and could not have gone through the book. But I have pored over the 8
page Executive Summary. It is more, at least 70% by casual reckoning, a NOT IPCC Report. The insistent tone is
IPCC conclusion is wrong, a mere assertion with very little research back up.
No one knows where it got the funds from, but we may wish to offer the conjecture
that Koch brothers must have had a hand in it. I can go on and on, but my
purpose here is merely to show, merely to establish the parallel. The climate
change skeptics are copying the modus
operandi of the tobacco lobby, contribute to some “motivated” research and
sell it as something neutral, something that carries integrity. If you are interested
further, you may go to Skeptical Science
[1].
In
conclusion, these evident parallels between tobacco and hydrocarbon industries
lead me to a dispiriting conclusion. People continue to smoke. A parallel to
that: people will continue to be unconcerned about climate change. The tobacco
companies shifted the disease burden from developed countries to developing
countries. The fossil fuel companies shift the burden of climate change to developing
countries while insulating the developed countries from the ill effects. The
city of New York is thinking of building multi-billion dollar defense against
storm surges (in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy) but the US will oppose any
financial help or technology transfer to small island states that run the risk
of going under as sea levels rise.
Hence
I conclude that climate change is cancerous.
Raghuram
Ekambaram
References
No comments:
Post a Comment