Take this with a grain of salt if you wish (I know I am), but according to Matt Drudge on 09/29/06, Al Gore has decided that “Cigarette smoking is a ‘significant contributor to global warming.’” The only other news outlet that I can find at the time of this writing that is also carrying the story is an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily, so the story is either that nobody is paying attention to Al Gore anymore (one can dream), the media aren’t interested in publicizing it for some reason, or he didn’t actually say it.
Regardless of whether or not he said it, this sounds like a fun argument to take a look at. Hokay. So.*
According to a scientific paper via the National Institutes of Health, South African cigarettes (which for my purposes I am assuming are just like the rest of the world, only made in South Africa) produce between 50 and 85 mg of carbon dioxide (CO2). We will go with a worst case scenario here and assume that every cigarette produced in the world will produce 85 mg of CO2.
Worldwide (at least as of 2004) there are 5,530 billion cigarettes produced and consumed per year. The CO2 production of all of the cigarettes in the world for an entire year would be a total of 470,050,000 kg. Quite a bit, obviously. But how does this amount compare with the amount produced by the combustion of gasoline?
Believe it or not, one gallon of gasoline produces 20.35 pounds of carbon dioxide. You can do the stoichiometry for yourself if you don’t believe the federal government (I believe them, so I didn’t bother calculating it on my own. Also, I’m lazy.) That’s REALLY a lot of carbon dioxide — 9.23 kg per gallon of gasoline.
When one takes into consideration that the United States consumes, on average, 9.2 million barrels of gasoline per day (a barrel is 31 gallons), this means a considerably larger amount of CO2 is being released into the atmosphere by American gasoline use on a given day.
In fact, the yearly production of CO2 worldwide by cigarettes is equivalent to the amount produced by American gasoline usage every 4 hours, 16 minutes, and 53 seconds.
Does smoking cigarettes produce a lot of carbon dioxide? Yes. Is the amount statistically significant in the production of carbon dioxide? Not really. Plus, with the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the air by the tobacco plants, the total amount is even lower. I’ll let somebody else industrious calculate how much CO2 the global tobacco crops remove from the air per year (remember: lazy).
This is not to say that cigarette smoking is good. I think it’s a vile habit, and can’t abide smoke myself. It messes with my lungs. Plus, I hate waiting in line at Sheetz behind people buying cigarettes. “What kind?” the cashier asks. “Two packs of Marlboro menthol Jacks 100,” the smoker says, or some similar string of branded rubbish. The cashier goes back and realizes they’re out of the Marlboro menthol Jacks 100s, but have the Marlboro Jacks 100s and the Marlboro menthol 100s. The smoker then says “You don’t have the Marlboro menthol Jacks 100s?” as though they thought the cashier was joking. The walking chimney then decides which of the two substitutes would be acceptable. The cashier then grabs the two packs, starts ringing them up, and stops again to inform the smoker that there is a ‘buy two get one free’ special on that particular type of little flaming death-sticks, and would they like a third pack for free? The smoker has to think about this one as well (and yes, I have actually heard people refuse free cigarettes). By this time, the people in line behind said smoker are visibly older, and could likely suggest several creative yet inappropriate and anatomically impossible ways for the smoker to smoke their cigarettes now that they have them.
And don’t even get me started on being behind people who are buying lottery tickets.