Climate Change Needs a Cigarette

By 1950 over half of all men and a fifth of all women in the United States smoked. Today, after more than fifty years of anti-smoking campaigns and deserving attacks on the tobacco industry, the smoking population has declined to less than fourteen percent of the total population.

Along the way to creating broad awareness of the dangers of smoking, smoking has become uncool, dirty, and generally viewed as an addiction of the unfortunate. Smokers are called butt suckers, ash heads, nic bitches, chimneys, cancer clouds, and other ugly names.

There are a lot of similarities between ‘the war on tobacco’ and ‘the war on climate change’: unhealthy consequences that [will] span generations, entrenched big-money interests, disinformation warfare, inept initial government responses, cultural trends, and more.

What’s missing from the war on climate change? Cigarettes.

With smoking, you can point to any effect and instantly know the cause: lung cancer…cigarettes; heart disease…cigarettes; mouth cancer…cigarettes; yellow teeth and premature aging…cigarettes; bad breath…cigarettes; and other dreadful things due to…cigarettes

Sure, with climate change there’s CO2 and greenhouse gasses, but try pointing to them.

Furthermore, climate language is constructed around addition versus subtraction: The more CO2 we ADD to the atmosphere, the bigger the problem, and so on. However, adding something [invisible] to anything that appears to have unlimited capacity [the atmosphere] instantly creates a comprehension hurdle. When we can’t comprehend the size of the groceries or the bag, it’s hard to understand the problem.

Subtraction on the other hand, is easier to grok. The world has finite resources, and eight billion humans, consuming as we do today, will deplete the resources that future generations need (e.g.: clean water). ‘Unlimited resources’ is a notion that nobody should have. On the contrary, when we consume [subtract] more than we need, we are the problem. There’s a simple truth to this common sense, depletion argument that doesn’t require specialized knowledge, carbon calculators, satellite data, climate models, or Ted Talks…demand will outstrip supply.

Since resource consumption and carbon generation are two sides of the same coin, it’s my belief as an entrepreneur and a marketer that ‘consumption’ is a far easier problem to communicate and solve than ‘generation’. Here’s a crude antidote to support my thesis: “consumption pig” or “carbon footprint”? Which combination of words generates an emotional response?

Words are everything.

My motivation for writing this post is simple: Like a lot of American families, we are generally aware that there’s a climate problem. However, we are nearly clueless about what to do about it. Sure, we recycle; we talk about climate; we read about climate; I have worked on climate initiatives; but, my family is still consuming way too much of the world’s remaining resources.

Not wanting to call — even jokingly — my family, friends, or neighbors “consumption pigs”, I decided to endeavour to come up with something we can use to lovingly shame each other into trimming our consumption.

After an extensive branding exercise, I have latched onto remixing “climate change”, “consumption”, and “hog” to come up with…”chog”.

Less offensive than “pig”, “chog” is the ‘cigarette’ climate change needs.

Excessive consumption…chogging.

Kids that leave the lights on…chogs.

McMansion…choghouse.

Large SUV…chogmobile.

Shopaholic…chogaholic.

Hamburger…chogburger (meat’s a problem)

Daily Amazon deliveries…chogwild.

Instagramming soccer mom iIdling an SUV for seventy minutes…megachog.

It’s time to make chogging as offensive as smoking.

This does not need to be mean-spirited. With family and friends, I suggest using a smile. With chogholes, try alternative approaches :)

Far too many of us are chogs. If the climate crisis is as urgent as it seems, expect to be politely prodded, then shamed, and then ultimately required to reduce consumption. Chogging and the preservation of species, including humans, are incompatible. It may take fifty years, but one way or another, chogs will become…dinosaurs.

Related post: The Last Chog