Let's remember: Carbon is the basis of all life on Earth. Plants use it in the form of carbon dioxide. During photosynthesis, plants turn sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into sugars that fuel their growth, exhaling oxygen. The oxygen animals breathe oxidizes the carbon in the plants they consume, causing animals to exhale carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide returns to the atmosphere when plants decay. Or the carbon they've locked up during photosynthesis can be stored over geologic time as fossil fuels. Burning
plants (as biomass or as fossil fuels) oxidizes their carbon, again, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Is life-giving and life-sustaining carbon dioxide a pollutant?
Vice President Al Gore thinks it is. Flawed computer models project CO2-induced catastrophic global warming 50-100 years from now. Vice President Gore puts his faith in these imperfect instruments instead of trusting what Earth itself is telling us.
Carol Browner, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, also thinks CO2 is a pollutant. On numerous occasions in public debate, she has characterized CO2 as malignant, instead of as the life-giving substance that it is. Not surprisingly, it is has been reported that the EPA has been trying to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant - under either the Rio treaty and the related Kyoto protocol or under the Clean Air Act - virtually all industrial activity in our country will be impacted and limited dramatically. Our government, itself, will regulate life.
Vice President Gore's view of CO2 is driving our government's activity related to climate change. Vice President Gore articulated his vision of apocalyptic global warming in the book Earth in the Balance, and he remains the most articulate and outspoken advocate of that vision. In his book, Vice President Gore characterizes American society as "dysfunctional" because of our heavy reliance on fossil fuels and calls for "wrenching" changes in the way we live and work.
The scientific criticism of the vice president's vision has been that the science is uncertain. Greening Earth Society (www.greeningearthsociety.org) believes such criticism is misplaced: The science of apocalyptic global warming is not uncertain; it's simply wrong. Our work with various prominent scientific advisors has convinced us that more CO2 in the air is good and not bad; with modest and benign climate change the anticipated outcome. Given carbon's key role in the creation of life, this conclusion should be common sense. But it is not - yet.
Observations and hundreds of experiments have confirmed the central positive thesis that increased CO2 content leads to enhanced agriculture productivity, more robust forest growth and greater plant growth, resulting in greater biodiversity and more robust animal populations due to increased ground cover.
An informed citizenry - in our considered view - will strongly resist efforts by the administration, international environmental regulators and EPA to cap, limit or in any way restrict U.S. reliance on abundant, cheap domestic fossil energy resources, including coal-fired electricity - the lifeblood of the U.S. economy.
1991 graduate of Oceana High School
Oceana, WV
Chris Paynter
Executive Director
Greening Earth Society
4301 Wilson Boulevard Suite 805
Arlington, VA 22203-4193
Ph: (703) 907-6168 or (800) 529-4503
Fx: (703) 907-6161
www.greeningearthsociety.org
www.fossilfuels.org
www.greeningearthsociety.org/climate/index.htm
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