It took almost 40 years to prove that smoking causes lung cancer.
Similarly, despite unambiguous scientific evidence, it still seems acceptable to deny that man-made CO2 release into the atmosphere causes global warming.
There's actually a good book covering these two instances and others: "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming"
- Upton Sinclair
Yep, and the Sugar Industry used the same tactics as Big Tobacco. They cleverly paid 'Researchers' to conclude that 'There's just not enough evidence, so more evidence is needed' and kept kicking the can down the road. They also did a media blitz campaign to discredit the real scientists who proved the tobacco links / sugar links to cancer.[1]
[1] Source: http://sugarcoateddoc.com
Tobacco was the core of many states' economies, and still remains a massive industry which makes many people wealthy.
Dealing with CO2 emissions would have required dealing with fossil fuel use... and that's tons of money and power in play there.
Sugar is, at the very least, another substance people crave, and has been making people rich for hundreds of years.
Delaying tactics are feasible when you have billions or trillions of dollars, control regulatory bodies, own politicians, scientists, and armies of lawyers. Delaying tactics on the orders of just a few decades means generations of VP's and C-levels getting unfathomably rich, as well as key shareholders. So... fuck the harm, delay, delay, delay.
The key is that you have to not give a shit about anyone other than yourself, or be genuinely deluded.
This is actually quite difficult. Despite its shortcomings (and perhaps ironically) religion can be effective at convincing people to put others first but I would say the default behavior in most people is "I only care about myself and family first". This default behavior is exacerbated when people follow the influence of greed, lust, etc.
The result is basically training people to be susceptible to propaganda.
- oil based energy now wrecking havoc
- "science" based nutrition
- free market
- communication technology
I'm listing the dark parts but there's something odd in the way we probably all swallowed the pill with such a big grin for so long and now pop, lies lies lies; also you're dying because of stupid practices fueled by greedy scammers.
Check this: http://archdruidmirror.blogspot.gr/2017/06/a-field-guide-to-...
http://archdruidmirror.blogspot.gr/2017/06/renewables-next-f...
- oil-based energy powered our global economy that was able to research alternative forms of energy
- both nutrition and science have always been an unfinished work, "we don't know everything" != "we know nothing"
- free markets, for their faults, are still better than any other base system we've come up with
- communications technology, I'd hazard we're still grasping with the repurcussions of this re: democracy and many other pre-existing systems. But the fact that I read about the Rohingya genocide by Myanmar again on the front page of the BBC this morning would indicate it has its advantages to the world too