No smoking II

I wrote about smoking as an example of great cultural and behavioural change even when capitalist incentives were against the trend. There was a time of course when businesses were happy to produce cigarettes and tobacco and many things helped to conspire to remove it from most of our daily lives. That included government action (taxes, regulations for labeling, import restrictions, etc.), companies (benefiting non-smokers, rewarding them more), society (stigmatisation of smoking, some degree of marginalising smokers) and the market (some enlightened investors are choosing not to put their capital in such companies that damages lives)

It takes everyone to work on it, and they only do a small part. But it works, and can bring about broad, sweeping changes which seemed tiny in retrospect.

The truth is, industries are smoking, our power plants are smoking, agriculture industry is smoking. Why are we not taxing them, stigmatising them and rewarding the non-smokers more? Yes I’m talking about carbon dioxide emissions. We need to be able to track, monitor and release details about behaviours and get companies to act. It’s time for “No Smoking 2.0”.