The great anti-carbon dioxide conspiracy

May 18, 2006

In all seriousness, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a [tag]parody[/tag]. The [tag]Competitive Enterprise Institute[/tag], a front-group funded by the oil industry, has unveiled a new TV [tag]ad[/tag] that hopes to convince Americans not to worry about [tag]global warming[/tag]. The pitch — I swear I’m not making this up — is that [tag]carbon dioxide[/tag] is inherently good.

The first ad portrays global warming science as a vicious smear campaign against carbon dioxide. The ad, which despite appearances is not an SNL parody, helpfully reminds us that carbon dioxide is “essential to life” because “we breath it out.”

It’s comforting to know that this is the best global warming rejectionists can come up with. There are plenty of things that are healthy and essential in reasonable quantities but harmful in extremely large quantities. (For example, drinking a few glasses of water is beneficial. Drinking 10 gallons of water can kill you.) We need some carbon dioxide, but too much causes global warming.

You really have to see the ad to believe it. The tag line is so over-the-top, you’d think the Competitive Enterprise Institute was simply going for a cheap laugh: “Carbon dioxide: They call it ‘[tag]pollution[/tag]’; we call it ‘[tag]life[/tag].'”

You know, if the ad is in any way successful in changing Americans’ minds, it may open up a whole new way of arguing complete nonsense. For example, I can imagine those who make nuclear bombs creating ads explaining how great the nucleus of an atom is –“They call it a ‘weapon of mass destruction’; we call it ‘a basic particle of matter.”

And what caused the Competitive Enterprise Institute to create such a patently ridiculous commercial? Apparently, the ad is hitting airwaves nationwide just as [tag]Al Gore[/tag]’s movie is hitting theaters. It must be a pretty good movie to inspire such a panic-stricken response.

Next they’ll stop treating our sewage. I suppose that it is essential that we create it, but that doesn’t mean I want to drink it.

They call it ‘urine’, we call it ‘yellow water’.

  • Well, yeah, Dander. I mean, if CO2 is good, and trees eat the CO2, trees must be bad, bad, bad! We should chop ’em all down so they leave that good CO2 alone!

  • CO2 is great. If you are a plant.

    Not being one, I find it to be a toxic waste which I would prefer to avoid.

    Suggest that the ad-writers sit in a hermitically sealed room and try breathing their ever increasingly CO2 atmosphere.

    Or just show Apollo 13 some time. The astronauts nearly die of CO2, for God’s sake!

  • Do you think they’d be amused if I wandered over to their office, took a massive dump on their front step, and told them I was donating fertilizer to them?

  • It’s kind of funny… When I was on my high school debate team about 8-9 years ago, the topic was renewable energy. Some teams actually made this argument that CO2 was essential and that the use of renewable energy in place of fossil fuels would lead to a collapse of global agriculture and mass starvation and human extinction (in high school debate, even bs arguments can be good if the other team doesn’t respond to them). Anyway, IIRC the standard response was that there is already enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that eliminating manmade co2 emissions wouldn’t have much of an effect. I thought it was a stupid argument back then in debate. Now that it’s being discussed in public as if it were serious I REALLY find it stupid.

  • Think of the benefits of a carbon dioxide-rich planet:

    No long cold winters

    No snow shoveling

    Rising ocean levels means the liberal strongholds on the East Coast and Left Coast would be wiped out, leaving the new coastline ripe for settlement (Otisburgh!)

    No harsh weather conditons to impede Halliburton’s exploitation of Siberia and Antartica

    Can’t protect an Artic National Wildlife Refuge if you don’t have an “Artic”, right?

    Ships that were too big for the Panama Canal could cross the Istmus with ease

    Without New Orleans, no gay-loving Mardi Gras celebration

  • Minor point: the ad says carbon dioxide is “essential to life. We breath it out. Plants breath it in.” It doesn’t say “because,” so those statements are factually correct. Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that the ad itself is horse-pucky.

  • Too bad the tobacco companies didn’t think of this one. “The tobacco leaf – they call it poison. We call it life.”

    The public believed the government, and knew the tobacco companies were lying. Unfortunately, this adminstration has dragged us so far down that the government and the oil companies are on the same side.

    If they succeed in Swiftboating Al Gore and global warming, this world of ours is in for some really rough times. And I’m afraid the MSM is going to do the same thing that they do with all issues – treat it as partisan bickering, where there are no facts and no truths, merely opinions.

  • Lock these folks in a room with only CO2 and see how long it is before they engage in a lively (pun intended) campaign for CO2.

  • Cholesterol is essential to life too (human life, not plant life), but we get plenty without eating eggs cooked in bacon grease for breakfast every morning. One wonders whether they think anyone will fall for this (i.e., they think many Americans are stupid, and there is certainly some evidence of that), or if they just have to put something out there in opposition, no matter how vacuous, so that Hannity, Limbaugh, et. al. will have something to point to.

  • Just think what life would be like if there was no vegetation to consume all that carbon dioxide. No vegetation — no vegetation consumers. We humans eat vegetation as well as animals that consume vegetation. We also depend upon vegetation (in the forms of coal and crude oil) to heat our homes and to power our vehicles. Trees furnish us with wood to build our homes and furniture and provide shade from the hot summer sun. Flowers make life worth living by showing us what real beauty is.

  • — ‘Leather. Meat. Milk. Things we need and the animals that made agriculture possible.

    Bull shit. Some call it ‘pollution’. We call it ‘life’.’ —

    I have to say, these ads play like arch-satire from some hip new anti-global warming group. Incredible. Do you suppose that the people at the ad agency were laughing really hard when they cashed the check?

  • Gee, silly me, I thought Competitive Enterprise implied we were serious about leading edge science and business opportunities from leading edge science rather than stuffing one’s head up one’s ass and wishing that a couple thousand years of advancing knowledge would just go away.

    There are a whole bunch of smart people in the rest of the world (think China, India, the EU) and THEY are going to figure out the business opportunites from global warming whereas our CEOs have decided thinking about business beyond next quarter’s numbers is just too tough.

  • This reminds me of the news broadcast in Woody Allen’s film
    Bananas where newsreader Roger Grimsby reads the headline:
    “Today the National Rifle Association declares that Death is a Good
    Thing.”
    The conservatives are starting to lose their touch. If this is the best they
    can do this shows they are on the decline and will be dropping fast.
    Let’s hope the public finally starts to wake up to how badly it has been
    ripped by the jackals who have taken over our government before it is too
    late. Then maybe death will be a preferential option.

  • “why do liberals hate beer?” – bluto

    Because it looks, smells and tastes like urine?

    I haven’t acquired a taste for cocaine either. When you have to ‘acquire’ a taste for something, it is usually bad.

  • Funny. But not so funny is that the creed of the CEI comes about as close to defining Ws governing philosophy as possible — da bidness uh ‘Merica id bidness.

  • I think that whoever is paying for the continued existence of the CEI needs to have their noses rubbed in this pile of “Tobacco Science” crap.

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