Climate Change? Nahhh ...

Luther Terry did a lot to educate the public about how harmful smoking was, both as surgeon general and after he left that post.

In a gallup poll conducted in 1958, 44 percent of Americans believed that smoking caused cancer. By 1968, it was 78 percent.

And yet? Lung cancer deaths kept rising and didn't peak until the 1990s. It's easy to overstate the actual effects of that 1964 report.

That report summarized more than a decade of evidence that was not produced by the U.S. government, about the effects of smoking. That evidence wasn't entirely unknown to the public by 1964, and would have become clear to more and more people with or without Luther Terry having been surgeon general.

And if that is your example of the U.S. government saving people from themselves (because I think it was mostly about Luther Terry himself). ... then you have to acknowledge that that same report told people that nicotine wasn't addictive, something that the surgeon general didn't correct for 24 years.

 

And my point hasn't changed.

They lobby to try to get Congress to turn a largely corrupt game of picking winners and losers via legislation in their favor.

In the course of that becoming the norm (unfortunately), you have had oil companies trying to minimize perceptions of the impact of their products on the environment, through lobbying efforts, or otherwise.

Their lobbying (or if they didn't lobby) isn't the arbiter of their actual impact on the environment. Nor is it somehow keeping others from indpendently proving otherwise. Their lobbying doesn't answer much bigger questions about the choices people in the aggregate want to make when trying to balance that environmental impact (because fossil fuels have transformed lives) with the impact various "policies" -- which will force behaviors on people that give them less utility -- are likely to have on our overall standards of living. Nor does any of it address the inevitable unintended consequences of the various policies and prescriptions people are pushing for, which have the potential to do other harm.

ExxonMobil or Toyota or whover the boogie man du jour is can cast their product in whatever light they think is beneficial to their businesses. It's not like evidence to the contrary isn't being independently produced and isn't well-known to the public.