Big Energy inhales tobacco's lesson

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GECON-01-300514.html



Big Energy inhales tobacco's lesson
By Michael T Klare
May 30, '14

In the 1980s, encountering regulatory restrictions and public resistance to smoking in the United States, the giant tobacco companies came up with a particularly effective strategy for sustaining their profit levels: sell more cigarettes in the developing world, where demand was strong and anti-tobacco regulation weak or nonexistent. Now, the giant energy companies are taking a page from Big Tobacco's playbook.

As concern over climate change begins to lower the demand for fossil fuels in the United States and Europe, they are accelerating their sales to developing nations, where demand is strong and climate-control measures weak or nonexistent. That this will produce a colossal increase in climate-altering carbon emissions troubles them no more than the global spurt in smoking-related illnesses troubled the tobacco companies.

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To boost their sales, outfits like Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco also brought their legal and financial clout to bear to block the implementation of anti-smoking regulations in such places. "They’re using litigation to threaten low- and middle-income countries," Dr Douglas Bettcher, head of the Tobacco Free Initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO), told the Times.

The fossil fuel companies - producers of oil, coal, and natural gas - are similarly expanding their operations in low- and middle-income countries where ensuring the growth of energy supplies is considered more critical than preventing climate catastrophe.