• Question: hi, i was just wondering, if everyone gave up smoking would that help any problems on the earth, apart from peoples health that is?

    Asked by kehhkgch to Andrew, Emma, Marianne on 18 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Andrew Maynard

      Andrew Maynard answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Hi kehhkgch,

      You might get a lot of very irritable people that made things worse, because they were suffering withdrawal symptoms 🙂

      I think it would be good for everyone’s health if there was no smoking, but no – I don’t think it would help solve any of the bigger problems we face, because at the heart of many of them is human nature.

    • Photo: Marianne Baker

      Marianne Baker answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Probably not; I think pollution from smoking is miniscule compared to things like cars and planes.

      Though, if we converted tobacco fields into forests, that would help!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Hi kehhkgch….interesting question and one I had not thought about until now. Cigarette smoke emits a number of nasty gases and particles so perhaps if everyone on the entire planet stopped smoking it would:

      a) reduce the amount of particles containing substances that can cause cancer from being in the air that we breath;

      b) reduce the litter from fag butts left on the pavement;

      c) less carbon dioxide emissions from the energy used to make them and less water consumption from the processing of the tobacco leaves;

      d) less use of paper in the packaging of cigarettes and therefore less need for trees to be felled to supply that paper;

      but….

      a) an industry supporting low paid workers would disappear…what would they do next?

      that’s just a few…and I’ll probably think of a few more on the way home!:)

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Hi kehhkgch, I think if everybody gave up smoking that would lead to much less health-care service utilisation (less people going to doctors and hospital). People would live a lot longer too. The amount of money we have to spend on smoker’s health-care problems would go down but might be balanced by the amount of money we have to spend caring for a longer living population (your care bill goes up as you age too).

      I don’t know how that would work out economically but i bet that other factors like less sick-days, longer useful working lives would mean it came out in favour of smoking stopping. I suspect we would have more money to spend on research into non-smoking related diseases and would make more progress on these. I don’t know if it would have environmental benefits I suspect not (maybe Paula knows?).

      Wow good question. i’ll be thinking about this for weeks.

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