Courtesy of City of Cambridge
The municipal authorities of Cambridge, the Massachusetts city that is home to such prestigious universities as Harvard or MIT, have decided to place bright yellow stickers on gas station pumps warning drivers that “the burning of gasoline, diesel and ethanol has major consequences on human health and the environment including contributing to climate change.”
The label, also used in Sweden, mirrors the warnings on tobacco products and that have the same purpose: to remind us that a gesture as normal as filling up the tank of our vehicle is actually very harmful. Nobody believes that these labels will save the world or prevent people from filling up their cars, but they make some of us stop and think about the climate emergency, and consider more sustainable mobility to help tackle it. These types of label has been on cigarette packages for many years now, and probably haven’t persuaded many people to give up smoking, but they have changed society’s attitude towards tobacco, which is no longer considered attractive and cool, and is instead synonymous with disease, irresponsibility and anti-social behavior.
Not so long ago, tobacco advertising was everywhere, connoting style, and the industry even paid some doctors to promote their products. But after years of campaigning, consumption has been greatly reduced, and no one who lights a cigarette is unaware of the impact on their health and that of the people around them.
Putting fossil fuels in the same category as tobacco is an interesting move that will doubtless spark controversy. In practice, these are habits — lighting a cigarette or filling the tank — that have been part of everyday life for generations, and thus it’s hard work to convince people that they are harmful. The two problems, in fact, share similarities: despite warnings from the entire scientific community, it took several decades for society to begin to recognize the harmful nature of tobacco and its effects both on people’s health and public spending on health systems. In both cases, attempts have been made to discourage consumption or at least alleviate its effects by taxing it heavily. The big difference is that while we can accept the fact that a certain percentage of idiots among us are slowly committing suicide and putting a burden on our public health systems because they choose to inhale tobacco smoke, the climate emergency is an existential threat, likely to make our planet uninhabitable.
As have their partners in crime in the tobacco industry, oil companies have spent decades trying to mask and deny the harmful effects of their products, and they still continue to do so. Even today, when those effects are well understood, the world continues to overproduce tobacco and, above all, we make much more oil than is needed. The oil companies have lied to us that we all need vehicles capable of covering more than 400 miles and whose tanks we can fill in five minutes, or that national grids won’t be able to meet the demand to charge electric vehicles, while at the same time encouraging us to buy vehicles based on their size, their power or their speed, making them into an expression of social prestige or even testosterone. But the reality won’t go away: this is a harmful product that is contributing to an existential problem every time we fill the tank.
The new European Union emissions limits that come into effect in 2021 mean that car manufacturers, which will now be evaluated by the total emissions of the vehicles they have sold, desperately need to put many more electric vehicles on the market. This has given rise to a race by many companies to get rid of factories adapted to the assembly of combustion vehicles, something that could have important effects on the economy.
People are beginning to turn away from petrol and diesel vehicles. Increased demand for electric vehicles, coupled with government incentives, will determine whether countries become residual markets where the vehicles that more developed countries don’t want are sent, or instead, cutting-edge markets with the capacity to attract investment to manufacture and assemble these electric vehicles. For any country now, being chosen by Elon Musk as a location for a new Tesla factory is like winning the lottery. In the meantime, with or without labels, and just as happened with tobacco, we now need to think about the harm we are doing every time we fill our tanks.
