Compliance » Is Climate Change The Next Tobacco?

Is Climate Change The Next Tobacco?

November 25, 2015

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Writing in the New Yorker, Lincoln Kaplan considers the possibility that a campaign by the fossil fuel industry to mislead about environmental harm from carbon pollution is analogous to the tobacco industry’s decades-long campaign to mislead about the dangers of smoking, and that similar legal strategies for critics might be in the cards. There are likely two possible strategies potentially on the table, he says. One, now being pursued by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, is based on the state’s Martin Act, which is essentially a disclosure statute pertaining to securities and commodities. As a path to reach the fossil fuel industry, according to Kaplan, it’s shorter and easier but less consequential than an alternative, which would invoke RICO. It’s hard to say which direction this legal battle will take, one of these two or perhaps some other, but it’s getting more difficult to deny there is going to be one. “Though its effects are very costly to society and, to many, immoral, tobacco is mainly a scourge for smokers and those who live and work with them,” he concludes. “Climate change is a threat to the entire planet and mankind as a whole, and is annually getting worse.”

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