Learning from tobacco control: understanding and challenging negative feedback loops

The Global Tipping Points report, released at COP28, offers a comprehensive exploration of the current knowledge regarding tipping points in essential earth systems. While addressing concerning negative tipping points, the report also dedicates a section (Section 4) to examining the concept of positive tipping points (PTPs) in technology, the economy, and society. It argues that by triggering PTPs in these domains, we can match the scale, speed, and depth of action required to avoid the negative tipping points threatening critical earth systems.

In searching for examples of positive social tipping points and activities that represent negative feedback loops, the dramatic falls in the % of the population who smoke tobacco products provides one area of comparison. In this session we contend that to break the hegemony of fossil fuel companies over energy polity and government, we can learn two lessons from history of tobacco control internationality. The first is to examine the PR activities and market manipulation activities of the oligopolistic tobacco companies whose aim was to extend the time between the negative impacts of their products being proven to the point where effective market controls were placed of their activities. These activities were focused on both upstream (governmental) and downstream (consumer) audiences.

This session argues that the activities of the fossil fuel industry, particularly the major private oil and gas companies, should treated as highly sophisticated market interventions designed to act as a negative feedback loop slowing the positive social tipping points to toward low carbon economy. In expert led case study sessions we will explore the downstream and upstream PR activities of the tobacco industry and compare these to those of the oil and gas industry. This will include examining above and below the line marketing communication strategies, digital marketing practices, lobbying and the funding ‘astroturfed’ community campaigns. From this relevant tobacco control mechanisms including legislation and regulations restricting both supply and demand will be examined through the lens of successful and ongoing legal interventions such as the campaign against unconventional oil and gas in Scotland and the Rosebank oil field.

Having examined these activities participants will explore mechanisms, informed by their academic, legal and practitioner experience and expertise, that can remove these dampening effects. The written and oral output of this session will form the basis of submission aimed at the Positive Tipping points section of the updated Global Tipping Points report.