The Tobacco Example

As the editor of Change.org's Sustainable Food and Environment channels, I find two major issues regularly on the agenda: fast food and climate change.

The fast food industry is anathema to sustainable food, as you know if you've read Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore's Dilemma or (ahem) our blog. Sometimes, though, I have to ask myself: Are we too hard on fast-food companies?

To which my answer is no. Here's why: They know what's in the products they sell. While educated people may disagree on whether high-fructose corn syrup is bad for you, the fast food chains also know about the cholesterol, salt, trans fats and irrationally high calorie counts in their products.

In other words, they know their products are bad for you and they sell it to you anyway; they spend a good chunk of the profits fighting legislation that would require them to tell you what they know.

Does this sound familiar? It should: The only difference from the tobacco industry is that their product is also addictive. But the fast food industry targets children with the aim of creating life-long "brand loyalty" — also known as disastrous eating habits.

Climate change also fits the model. Climate change is bad for you, and fossil fuel companies are selling it to you. They continue to spend some of their obscene profits funding bogus science that suggests that their products aren't to blame; God is. They also lobby for policies that will lock in oil and coal dependence at the national level: More roads, less renewable energy. Perhaps most dangerously of all, from a legal standpoint, the companies are lobbying quite successfully against cap-and-trade regulations.

Several lawsuits are percolating up through the courts that may hold oil companies accountable the way an earlier generation of tobacco lawsuits took that industry to task. (Note, though, that those companies continue not only to exist but to thrive.)

The island community of Kivalina, Alaska (pictured), is suing oil companies for the cost of relocating their village. (With no ice to shield the island from winter storms, residents face unlivable conditions and considerable erosion.) Residents in Mississippi are suing over Hurricane Katrina. And the insurance giant Swiss Re has warned corporations that these suits could come home to roost.

Just as it's an uphill battle to prove causality between a dangerous product — fast food or cigarettes, say — and a specific illness in a specific person, linking energy giants to particular natural disasters will be no easy task. There's also the issue of setting a date after which a reasonable CEO would know that fossil fuels spur climate change, and apportioning the damage caused after that date.

Even so, Michael B. Gerrard, the director of its Center for Climate Change Law, told the New York Times that the early court cases against tobacco companies also looked like long shots. "They lost the first cases; they kept on trying new theories," he said, "and eventually won big."

Britain's McLibel case against McDonald's also looked like no threat to the fast food giant.

If citizens can't trust their governments to stand up for the public interest, they may have to resort to suing corporations directly.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons