I remember standing on Belmont Avenue in Chicago in the mid-1990s, when you could still see the headlines in a newspaper box, and losing hope that Congress would ever take on the tobacco lobby. Such was my misspent youth, that this, instead of love, should make me forlorn.

When I started this newsletter I wrote that our administration seems to aspire to a Fossil Axis with our new natural allies or subjects, repressive petrostates. That process is unfolding. It’s not the work of one person, but of a fossil fuel lobby that has never been more powerful or, paradoxically, more desperate. Which brings me back to Big Tobacco.

The first research that connected smoking to lung cancer came out in the early 1950s in Britain, after which it took more than 10 years for the U.S. Surgeon General to acknowledge the link. In the 40 years from the first studies through the mid-1990s, hundreds of lawsuits were brought against major American cigarette companies. They all failed.

Legislation to hold tobacco companies accountable also failed. The conventional wisdom was that nothing would get through the Senate, and that turned out to be right, though it also turned out, in the end, not to matter.

Smoking had been losing its appeal for some time. I remember a high school friend insisting that the smoker he was dating rinse her mouth with orange juice before they kissed. In the 1980s, cities started considering indoor smoking bans. Smoking was banned on all domestic flights in 1990. McDonald’s started phasing out smoking sections in 1994, and in 1995 California passed a statewide ban on smoking in workplaces, including restaurants.

There was a shift, and it was quick, where I went from wearing clothes seasoned with second-hand tobacco, to sniffing out tar molecules like a truffle dog on the hunt.

Coincidentally or not, right as smoking became socially unacceptable, Big Tobacco folded and signed what became known as the Master Settlement Agreement with 46 states (the other four sued and settled separately). The MSA forced the industry to stop its aggressive marketing, make annual payments to the states in perpetuity for smoking-related medical expenses, and close its disinformation institutes.

Congress never did act. The Senate defeated a version of the MSA earlier the same year, so the states went directly at the major tobacco companies. On paper, they won because they had a better legal strategy, but it was also true that Big Tobacco lost power as it lost customers.

My little moment of despair on Belmont Avenue happened less than four years before the MSA.

The MSA was and remains exceptional in its size and scope: over $200 billion, with the total going up every year, forever. The distant runner-up, the aggregate of several opioid settlements, comes to around $50 billion. BP’s liability for the Deepwater Horizon spill was $20 billion.

I suspect the fossil fuel industry has studied very closely the lessons from Big Tobacco. The MSA is to business as Watergate is to politics: something that can never be allowed to happen again, by which people on opposite sides mean either a) never again can we allow this scale of misconduct, or b) never again can we allow the public to bring down the high and mighty.

Big Fossil knows that when you add up past and future disaster losses, crop failures, heat deaths and other damages connected to climate change, their potential liability is many times greater than Big Tobacco’s.

Is it fair to scapegoat Big Fossil? Not entirely. We all use fossil fuels, sometimes gleefully. I drove a sports car when I was younger. People on pain meds should not get addicted. Smokers should quit. But since Big Fossil has a long record of climate disinformation and resistance to clean energy, since opioid makers knowingly pushed an addictive drug on vulnerable patients, and since the defense of personal responsibility did not save Big Tobacco, it’s fair enough.

It doesn’t matter that much electricity is still made with fossil fuels, or that getting to net-zero will be hard. This is about human psychology and a tipping point. Non-smokers threaten Big Fossil. All along, the industry has exploited our short-sightedness: put fuel in our tank and gas in our homes, and any consequences fall below the horizon. Now the same short-sightedness can be turned against the industry: if we’re not breathing your product, we don’t care about your problems.

I thought I was pro-climate before, but every day I had to block out the awareness of my own gas car’s exhaust. Once we got an EV and installed solar panels, I realized clean energy was possible and felt great. Not everyone can afford to make the switch, but the early adopters drive down the cost for others. And it’s not even that early.

Big Fossil executives don’t want you to drive past the gas station. They don’t want you to close your garage and smell no exhaust. And they definitely don’t want you getting clean power at home, so much so that they will lobby the government to shut down an approved wind farm and use $1 billion of our money to bribe the developer to extract natural gas instead.

Demoralized environmentalists view the attacks on clean energy as a demonstration of Big Fossil’s power. I see them as signs of panic. Much of the world is moving on. If fossil fuels are clearly superior, why are we trying to force our trading partners to buy them?

Big Fossil used to maintain, correctly, that you could not have growth without fossil fuels. Now most developed countries have decoupled growth from emissions. I remember thinking, when EVs gained real market share in 2023-24, that the Saudis and domestic producers had to be worried. Now we see how much they were, and are.

As with Big Tobacco, lobbying politicians against Big Fossil is a waste of money. There’s too much on the other side. You have to soften the soil around the monolith. I would love to see the green billionaires (there are still a few) and big organizations invest in private programs to help homeowners cap their gas lines and buy EVs, or in billboards and public awareness campaigns featuring three words: “Dirty. Backward. Old.”

I’ll talk next week about one big difference between our responses to Big Tobacco and Big Fossil, and will leave you on an optimistic note: It’s way too soon to feel hopeful, but one can start to find hope by finding the fear in the other side.

Piccata di Pollo

If I were more organized and clever, I would have brought you some kind of smoker recipe, but I don’t have one, and I made this dish the other night. It was the first time I thickened the sauce with a paste of flour and butter, and I liked how it came out.

This is not a hard recipe, but as with all recipes that use chicken or fish, the biggest risk is drying out your protein. You’re going to be working with thin slices of chicken breast that cook very quickly, and that will continue to cook while resting on a warm plate and then returning to your pan.

If in doubt, you can always cut one slice before serving. If it’s not white all the way through, except for the occasional vein, it’s easy enough to heat the slices a little more (separately from the sauce, if you've already added fresh lemon juice). You can fix undercooking, but you can’t rehydrate chewy chicken.

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