Kate Matsuda · 8 answers · 7mo

Proposal: We made smoking tobacco a socially awkward and disgusting habit and outlawed it to boot. In the name of health. That transition only took 20 years from a generally acceptable public habit of everybody to a crime. Now why the fuck cannot we do the same with climate ruining habits?

It took my father dying of lung cancer to get me to quit smoking. I personally don't see any climate change. I live in a really clean city.

I think it's a lot easier with tobacco because you can point to people with stomas from their throat cancer and show people's blackened lungs and all...with climate it's somewhat more abstract - like you can talk about rising ocean levels and melting ice caps and polar bears and all but it doesn't play quite as well when folks are self-centered and can't wrap their heads around what climate changes is specifically going to do to THEM in their day-to-day lives - once again, this is a failure of leadership that doesn't value education (and also are being paid off by the same people currently wrecking the planet)

We don't have a good enough solution yet. Renewable energy is cool but it can't supply anywhere near the power that is needed to stop using fossil fuels to make electricity

I watched 'About a Boy' last week. It's one of my favourite films and I haven't watched it for years. The most shocking thing about the whole thing? Hugh Grant takes out a cigarette and lights up. IN A RESTAURANT!

Who knows, maybe in a couple of decades we'll be watching a film and be flabbergasted at someone driving a car with a combustion engine.

Smoking is a very specific, limited aspect of life compared to what would have to be changed to make human lifestyles sustainable. The compromises would have to be broad, immense and profound. People are, of course, too dumb, shortsighted and insulated to ever realize how necessary this is, so they'll never be willing to put up with the extreme inconvenience. There's also the problem that the rich get richer off of economy activity, which would have to generally be drastically lowered, and the rich of course use their power and influence to corrupt government and prevent it from implementing necessary regulations.

Smoking is often recreation. Polluting the environment mostly isn't, and there is bound to be lots of resistance from multiple parts of society (money talks, y'know)

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