Big Tobacco company phasing out smoking in its offices to ‘better accommodate both nonsmokers and smokers’ — http://t.co/mz4p57ooRz

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) October 24, 2014

When you start seeing tobacco companies banning smoking in their offices, you have to realize that the gig is up.

Energy companies have learned a bunch from tobacco companies on how to deny and avoid responsibility for the damage they’ve done to public health and the environment. We see it every day from nonsense published by energy-company backed sources denying global warming or climate change. We saw it with how energy companies denied for decades that leaded gas played any role in horrific public health outcomes. We see it still with how they address the environmental damage wrought by fracking, oil and gas distribution safety, etc.

That’s why they’re holding on so tenaciously. They know that the public is on to them just as surely as the public began to realize just how deadly tobacco products were and are.