Think of an old black-and-white photograph, the kind that seems almost too strange to believe. A man in a white doctor’s coat, stethoscope around his neck, holds up a pack of cigarettes with a reassuring smile. “More doctors smoke this brand,” the advertisement claims. It sounds like a parody now, but for a generation this was normal. People trusted doctors; doctors were paid to smile; cigarettes were marketed as health, comfort, independence, even sex appeal. Decades later we discovered that tobacco companies knew what their own scientists had quietly concluded: cigarettes were killing people. They didn’t shout the truth from a rooftop. They built an elaborate machine of doubt, funding conflicts, hiring friendly voices, and making the public wonder if science had really made up its mind. Now, in the pages of The Sun Chronicle, a “Two Views” essay asks us to look at that story again, because the same machine seems to be running under a different brand. The headline says it plainly: the fossil fuel industry follows big tobacco’s disinformation. That is a strong accusation, but the essay is not just name-calling. It is a human story about trust, memory, and the uncomfortable way we let certain hard truths fade into the background.
The playbook from the cigarette era is startlingly clear once you begin to recognize it. Tobacco companies never stood up in front of Congress and said, “We are killing you and we are happy about it.” That would have ended them. Instead, they created confusion where clarity existed. One tobacco executive wrote that “doubt is our product” because doubt, not proof, was the most effective way to compete with the body of fact in the public’s mind. The strategy was simple: fund a handful of contrarian scientists, emphasize the weaknesses in every study, talk about personal choice, and make any mention of regulation sound hysterical. Every time health experts proved another link between smoking and lung cancer, the industry answered with a study that seemed to prove the opposite, or at least to raise one more nagging question. Sound familiar? That is the exact rhythm we have seen in climate politics for decades. The fossil fuel industry has not had to convince people that oil and gas are completely harmless. It has only had to create enough uncertainty in our minds to keep us from changing the way we live. By the time the public is tired of the debate, the companies have sold another million barrels. The connection to tobacco is not a metaphor of loose resemblance. It is a documented pattern of behavior, as if someone took the old cigarette manual, changed the names, and printed a new copy.
The first view, the view that the essay seems to present with the greatest weight, is that this is not a coincidence but a deliberate borrowing of tools. Long before climate change became a daily headline, fossil fuel companies were doing their own research. In the early 1980s, Exxon’s own scientists warned executives that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels would warm the planet and that the consequences could eventually be severe. That warning did not lead to an awakening. Instead, according to many internal documents and lawsuits, the company chose to feed the opposite message to the public. By the late 1990s, a strategy memo linked to the American Petroleum Institute argued that one of the industry’s most important goals should be to recruit credible scientists and use them to raise questions about climate science. It was not a plan to debate fairly; it was a plan to stall. This, the essay reminds us, is exactly what tobacco companies did when they paid researchers to declare that cigarettes deserved more study. The result is what some historians have called “merchants of doubt”: a small group of voices who can make a settled question look like an open argument. For anyone who has lost a parent to smoking-related disease or watched a child suffer from asthma, the resemblance feels almost personal. For anyone who has lived through floods, fires, or unbearable heat, it feels like being lied to by someone who promised to take care of you.
But the “Two Views” format of The Sun Chronicle asks us to listen to the other side too. The counter-argument, often made by industry representatives and some energy workers, is that oil and gas companies are not villains but simply providers of the energy that made modern life possible. They would say that no one needs a conspiracy theory to explain their behavior; they were selling exactly what the world demanded. Cars needed fuel. Factories needed electricity. Families needed warm homes and cheap air travel. Every person who drives a gasoline-powered car or uses a plastic product is part of the same system. In this view, climate change is not a hoax, but it is also not a simple court case with a single guilty defendant. The solution is not to shame the energy sector into silence, because doing so could leave billions of people in poverty, especially in developing countries. The industry may have delayed action, but politicians, ideologies, and ordinary habits also delayed action. We all liked the low price of gas and the cheap plastic package. If the government had wanted to put a price on carbon, it could have done so years ago. The second view, in other words, asks us to stop moralizing and start engineering. It asks us to treat the energy transition as a difficult road we have to travel together, and not as a confession that must be forced from a corporation.
Whatever we decide about those two views, the human cost is what makes the story urgent. Big tobacco’s disinformation campaign did not just spare a few weekends of public argument. It directly led to lung disease, cancer, and death for millions of people who might have quit earlier if they had been told the truth. The damage was personal, microscopic, and slow. Climate denialism, the essay suggests, is doing something worse because the harm is shared by everyone and lasts much longer. It is not just the person buying the gasoline who breathes the polluted air; it is the child in the stroller, the pregnant woman whose exposure to extreme heat raises the risk of premature birth, the farmer who sees the season turn bitter and unreliable. When an industry creates doubt about weather patterns, it is not just delaying papers and meetings. It is helping to shape a world in which a family in Louisiana packs emergency bags as another hurricane appears on the radar, or a firefighter in California sees months of smoke instead of sunrise. The cigarette companies took a product that was dangerous but optional; the fossil fuel industry took a product that the world depended on and sometimes behaved as if that dependence was a permanent get-out-of-jail card. It is a profoundly unfair burden to place on the average customer, who cannot solve the climate crisis by cross-shopping at a clean-energy supermarket.
In the end, the true lesson of this comparison is not that all energy companies are evil, or that everyone who lights a candle must feel guilty. The lesson is that disinformation is an act of violence against a whole society, because it steals our ability to make informed choices. The Sun Chronicle essay, in its own restrained way, is a warning. We cannot bring back the smokers who were misled in the 1950s and 1960s, but we can still choose what to do with the knowledge we have today. We can look at another industry-funded press release that says climate science is still unsettled and remember that “doubt is our product.” We can remember that a company can be brilliant enough to build a wind turbine and still spend money to convince you that the sun is not rising. The human answer is not to give up on each other or to turn our backs on the working people who have built the energy economy. The human answer is to demand honesty, to share the burden of change fairly, and to treat the next generation’s question—what did you do when you knew?—as a burden we actually want to carry. The fossil fuel industry followed big tobacco’s playbook, but it is not too late for the public to follow a different path. We can stop being the audience for manufactured doubt and begin being the authors of a more truthful future, one in which our children inherit not just our energy needs, but our willingness to see clearly, act kindly, and remember that facts belong to everyone, not just to the highest bidder.