Quitting to smoke cigarettes is hard. At least for a few days you won’t be able to think about something else then the lovely features of a cigarette: it makes you calm, it helps you start a conversation (“Got a lighter for me?”), it’s perfect with a good coffee. Wrong. After a while you will enjoy your coffee as well as before, you recognize that you are able to talk to strangers without asking for fire or you will be able to sit and relax without a smoke.

A new study from the George Washington University took that experience and compared it to our use of fossil fuel. And it says that it’s basically the same.

How do you consume fossil fuel? Think about it for a moment. Do you see any analogy? Well, yes, there might be comprehensible parallels. But it’s more like a metaphor.

Of course, we will not be able to stop using fossil fuel, or carbon compounds, right away. They are almost everywhere around us. We use them in our daily routines, sometimes without being aware of it. Think about the plastic in your toothbrushes or salat bowles or about the fuel in your car. It’s bad and you know it, but there’s no way out, right? It’s the same about smokers. Besides that smoking has a lot of socio-cultural reasons, most smokers know about the dangers of cigarettes. But a lot of them won’t stop anyway. They are “unhappy addicts”, both of them, smokers and carbon compound users. And if it’s hard to stop smoking, it’s harder to stop using fossil fuels.

But when smokers have the opportunity to just quit and feel sick for a short period of time, or look for a “healthier alternative,” like … bubble gum or cookies, the alternatives of fussil fuel junkie are still rare or harder to achieve.

The society is addicted entirely to energy, the services and convenience that fossil fuels provide. But maybe it’s possible to learn something from the way to deal with other bad habits. If we really want it, we can make it? Tell us your opinion!