You could have knocked me over with a well-jabbed pipe when I saw this op/ed in the Washington Post today about tobacco. It dares to cricitize the anti-smoking lobby:
Instead, nicotine abstinence is the policymakers’ only approach to tobacco. Like other abstinence campaigns (alcohol prohibition, sexual abstinence before marriage, just saying “no” to drugs), this one is both moralistic and ineffective.
One might have quibbles about the examples, but accepting his premise I wonder if the good professor would be willing to add “reduction of energy consumption” to that list? His message, one of technological adaptation so that we continue to get the benefit of nicotine while reducing the harm associated with tobacco smoke, appears to me to be exactly analogous to energy use and CO2 emissions.