And every town could layoff 20-25% of their fire fighters. (Since that’s the percentage of fires caused by smoking.) Plus the price for used fire trucks would drop drastically, with 1/5th of them being sold off by cities & towns.
Fire Departments now spend the majority of their calls responding to medical emergencies, rather than fires. But that would drop too, after a few years. Without smoking, there would be fewer hear attacks, strokes, etc. to send EMT’s to.
The OP asked mainly about the environmental effects of smoking ceasing.
I imagine the direct environmental effects of less tobacco being burned would be minor compared to the effect of that many more people not dying. The 5 most common causes of death in the world are all linked to smoking. Even if it takes a few years to really show up, that many people ceasing smoking will eventually take effect. The world population will increase even faster than it is now, with corresponding environmental damage from the earth having to support that many more humans, and for longer lives.
Smoking diseases tend to kill people after childbearing age. So the effects of more population would be purely linked to longer lifespans. Estimates say about 1 in 7 people worldwide are smokers and smoking takes 7 or 8 years off your life. So - average human lifespan would increase by a year. Not nothing, but not hugely significant either
If smoking went bust tomorrow, the environmental benefits would extend to agriculture, including greenhouse growers whose crops get infected by tobacco mosaic virus (a highly infectious pathogen spread by tobacco products).
Actually it’s the opposite. Medicare costs go up too. Dying is expensive. That’s true whether the cause is smoking related or something else some years later. There’s not really a difference in those end of life costs. The non-smoker tacks on a number of high cost years under Medicare before those end of life medical costs kick in, though.
Smokers still have higher lifetime medical care costs because of slightly higher costs along the way. They generally pay more, to quite a bit more, in taxes than those costs though. Those getting their insurance through the ACA marketplace also pay more for health insurance than non-smokers.
not to mention many levels of gov’t would have to make up for lost “sin tax” revenue (Cleveland has sin tax on booze and tobacco to support arts and stadiums/arenas). I think I read somewhere that 50% of price of cigarettes is taxes.
Wouldn’t those numbers suggest that the average human lifespan would increase by only 1/7th of a year?
I mention this only because a gain in one year for average longevity would, in fact, be highly significant. I can’t recall the specific numbers, but even if all cancer was to be eliminated, overall human life expectancy would increase by only a few years.
Smoke is just one facet of tobacco-based pollution. Cigarette butts are a massive, long-term environmental problem. See for instance here
Excellent, Toxylon, I think that’s exactly the kind of thing the OP is looking for. Fixed link: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cigarette-butt-filter-environmental-damage-plant-growth-study-a9011616.html
That’s not 100% clear. Here’s a study generally supporting your idea, but with caveats. In part it’s a question of time value of money if healthcare expenditures come later rather than sooner. But I agree it’s not valid to just take the gross current savings in treating smoking related illnesses without counting the future cost of healthcare for ex-smokers that wouldn’t occur if they died first from smoking related illnesses. And a lot of anti-smoking statements make that mistake
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199710093371506
For example the CDC’s summary on smoking costs here, just gives the current annual cost of treating smoking related illness without correcting for future costs to treat other illnesses of people who quit and avoiding dying of smoking related illnesses.
However that summary gives both smoking related illness healthcare costs and lost productivity of smokers as similar numbers, order of though less than 1% of US GDP per year. The lost productivity number is somewhat less subject to correction. If you get sick earlier you just work less and produce less. To the extent lost productivity is working age people dying, they also consume less but there’s certainly a proportion of people whose participation in the workforce is cut short by smoking related illnesses while they are still alive, consuming non healthcare resources, and would otherwise be working. That’s a net loss due to smoking.
All together assuming the CDC’s $156bil cost in lost productivity doesn’t need correction, assuming their $170bil in healthcare cost would be reduced to hear zero if corrected for later non-smoking HC costs of ex-smokers and the time value of money, the cost would seem to be on the order of 1% of GDP in the US. Although other studies also give lower numbers for either of those categories. Hard to believe ‘major problems’ like cigarette butts are anywhere near that though. Burning tobacco isn’t a net addition to atmospheric carbon unless you assume the same farm land would have been planted with other carbon capturing plants which wouldn’t have released it back (by decaying, being consumed, etc beside burning) for a very long time.
Public old age pensions like Social Security in the US are pure transfers, money from one pocket to another to consume the same items. It’s not forcing society to consume more on healthcare and less on nice cars or household items etc, nor a for reduction in output like workers who can’t work due to smoking related illness. So a reduction in SS payments because smokers don’t collect it for as many years is not a for societal benefit. It could be a second order benefit if lower taxes to support smaller SS payments are less of a disincentive to produce and invest, but that would be some relatively small fraction of the $'s not paid out assuming marginal change in moderate taxation.
All this is US and the question was global, but similar general principles apply. Lost productivity is real. Net healthcare cost impact is harder to correctly calculate and depends on rate of return assumption between societal costs now v later (which could be more important in poorer countries with higher potential growth rates and returns than mature economies). And it’s not a first order gain or loss to society as a whole to pay more or less in transfer payments like old age pensions.
Like most economic things now ‘global’ has to particularly account for China. Cigarette unit sales are 9+ times more in China than the US. China National Tobacco Company has 43% global market share.
After they got rid of a guaranteed price/purchase for tobacco buys NC is no longer that big of a tobacco state. A good number of NC farmers changed to other crops or hogs.
US tobacco production generally has tended to decline. NC’s slightly more than national but it’s still by far the leading tobacco state, 252 out of 533 million lbs nationally in 2018, US production was over 1bil #'s in 2000.
Chinese production was around 2.4bil lbs in 2018. Again if you just had to focus on one country as proxy for the global effect of no tobacco demand, it would be China not the US. Like a lot of things now.
Turns out the WHO looked into this very question. Some of their findings include:
Money quotes include:
“One estimate of the impact of deforestation in tobacco agriculture and curing is that it causes almost 5% of global greenhouse gas production.”
“According to this estimate, 4,740,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide would be emitted annually by global cigarette manufacturing.”