I’ve decided to take Dave Belden up on his challenge Imagine a Time When the Eco-Crisis is Over: Then Tell Us How We Got There? and address one aspect of how necessary behavioral change was achieved. Imagine if we got to a point where the realized threat of climate change to our own personal health and well-being and the health and well-being of our children was so ingrained in us that we would even consider a carbon footprint tax as a realistic revenue source for California? What if we got to a place that our understanding of ecology was such a given that a carbon footprint tax would even be popular and acceptable to the bipartisan leadership of this country with almost 1/2 of the Republicans supporting it?

Imagine an editorial in the Los Angeles Times that reads:

“Raising taxes in California these days is extraordinarily difficult. In fact, in their effort to eliminate a $x-billion budget shortfall, the state’s politicians are discussing dismantling California’s main welfare program, eliminating the health insurance program for poor children and decimating education without any apparent debate on raising the income or sales tax. One of the few state taxes that politicians have talked about raising is the carbon footprint tax… There aren’t that many taxes [like this one] that do good while raising money.”

This is exactly the tone of the rhetoric surrounding increased tobacco taxes today. In fact, the above editorial is based on an actual tobacco tax editorial in the Los Angeles Times which you can read here. Without diluting this post with an argument over the efficacy of a tobacco tax, I nevertheless want to use the text of this editorial as a way of discovering evidence of tactics used in a battle for positive change that has been largely already won.

Just on the basis of reading the language used in the LA Times tobacco tax editorial, here are the observations I can make about the anti-smoking movement as it may apply to overcoming our eco-crisis challenge:

1. Focus on one of the most significant causes of the problem. Although the American Cancer Society and American Lung Association know that there are a myriad of preventable causes of different forms of cancer, they focused on one particular behavior over a sustained amount of time that could make the most significant difference: get people to stop smoking tobacco.
2. Work hard and long and consistently to change the perception of the “bad” behavior. Through hard work and consistent messaging, perception about smoking has been changed from a “cool” behavior into first a bad habit and then into (more accurately) an addiction that needs to be overcome.
3. Always be on top of the math for both human cost and economic cost. The American Cancer Society has been superb at being able to quantify both how many people are getting cancer due to smoking and second-hand smoke and how much cancer is costing all of us in both increased taxes and increased medical costs.
4. Be able to clearly get people to understand the daily and ongoing threat to personal survival and the survival of every child. The threat about the effects of smoking and second smoke to each and every one of us (even non-smokers) is so concrete and comprehensible that being in favor of a “sin” tax on tobacco sales is seen to not only raise revenues but serve the public good.
5. Convince business that the perceived demand for keeping things as they are is elastic and changeable. Smoking was once considered to be so addictive that the demand for it was nonelastic (non-changing) no matter what policies, education, or tax penalties were put into place. Convincing people that change is in fact possible and not disastrous to existing businesses (in the case of tobacco – restaurants and bars) has been an important part of achieving change. New businesses have even cropped up to help with “kicking the habit”.
6. Address the “solving this problem hurts the poor” argument. Oddly enough, fiscal conservatives only seem to care about the poor when trying to argue against change they don’t want to see occur. The argument goes: “Surely, raising tobacco taxes will hurt the poor the most since they are paying the greatest part of what they earn to buy cigarettes.” The correct response is: “No, eliminating the tobacco habit works in favor of the poor who have the greatest incentive to ‘kick the habit’ and will have as a result more money and better health.”

These are just of the few of the observations I have been able to make. Perhaps continuing to look at editorials and news stories of successful movements of the past and present like the anti-smoking initiatives and using a word processor to substitute the word “climate change” will give great insight on how we can be successful in the future.