June 5, 2006
Who's Stupid?
Jonathan Chait at TNR thinks he has discovered a new intellectual low: the Competitive Enterprise Institute and its anti-global warming ads.
Chait's column, titled On carbon dioxide, conservatives take Americans for fools first establishes his street cred as a lip-curled cynic:
I had always thought that nobody had a lower opinion than I as to the analytical capacities of the American public. Then I discovered the Competitive Enterprise Institute.The institute is a conservative think tank in Washington that is less embarrassed than most conservative think tanks about raking in gobs of money from oil companies and propagating views that happen to comport precisely with those of their donors. It has been running ads attempting to cast doubt on the notion that fossil fuels bear any relation to global warming.
The oil companies'--sorry, I mean the institute's--approach to this challenge is to make people think fondly of carbon dioxide. It turns out to be a deeply misunderstood molecule. "We breathe it out," a narrator explains in one ad. "Plants breathe it in." We see an image of a young girl in pigtails blowing on a dandelion. The ad proceeds to explain that all this good stuff faces some sinister, amorphous peril. "Now, some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed. What will our lives be like then?" Plants will suffocate for lack of carbon dioxide! Little girls blowing on dandelions will be thrown into prison!
Can anybody actually believe this?
Over here! Jonathan! The bald guy in the blue shorts! Yes, I believe it!
I think one of the most misunderstood aspects of the Global Warming debate has been the difference between pollution and products of combustion. Perfect hydrocarbon combustion produces CO2 and water. If carbon dioxide had a nice, non-threatening name, like "water" there would be less capacity to whip up furor about it.
Imperfect combustion releases carbon monoxide (CO) and particulates, and Nitrous oxide and nitrous dioxide. Newer, cleaner engines have reduced these impressively and the smog statistics show the effects.
The pernicious thing about reducing CO2 is that you cannot have combustion. And, Mr. Chait, it is a natural compound, and plants do indeed "breathe" it. The difference between curbing CO and CO2 emissions is a world apart and when somebody comes along to educate people on this, they are called names by TNR and have their motives questioned.
ON THE OTHER HAND, the former Vice President of the US, and a man who was nearly President, has released a whopper of a movie that is packed with the most outlandish over-predictions, bolstered predominantly by untruths.
Chait does not mention "An Inconvenient Truth." But he finds time to write a column about a think tank that is using petro-chemical dollars to present their side of the story, which happens to be factual.
The concept is so unpersuasive, even on its own terms, I can't believe that Americans are stupid enough to fall for it. People may be dumb, but if they were that dumb, the world would be a different place. There would be thousands of technicians on call to help us operate our flush toilets. Emergency rooms would be filled with people who attempted to clean out their earwax with steak knives
Well, Mr. Chait, I guess we agree that somebody is stupid.
UPDATE: Watch the ads here
Environment Posted by jk at June 5, 2006 1:30 PM
Do you really believe JK that Mr. Gore and co. will introduce prison terms for blowing on dandelions? This is the stuff that drives me crazy about this debate, the over the top wackiness from both sides. Perhaps it is just a sign of the attention level of the masses that unless they are shocked by language they will not read, watch, or listen. When even the weather becomes sensationalized I worry about our collective attention span.
On a factual level CO2 is a natural compound, like H20 without its friendly name of water. (I never really thought about, perhaps what we really need is friendly names for more compounds.) But if you look at what is poisonous to the human body it is really all about levels, not compounds. Breathing in too much CO2 or drinking too much water can kill you just as dead as ingesting any poison.
Smog and Greenhouse gases are not one and the same either, as you say, CO and NO tend to be the big smog contributors and CO2 and H2O the big greenhouse gases. Again it is all about levels, and really the ability of the earth's atmosphere to balance the levels. CO2 is a necessary ingredient, but too much changes the balance and what effects that causes is worth studying. How else to determine the cause? Contrary to what our President may have stated, solving a problem without trying to determine its causes is not the best method.
Interestingly CO and NO have always been in the atmosphere as well with non-man made sources and yet the appearance of smog, or much higher levels of those gases is attributed to man and his increased use of combustion of hydrocarbons. This is a universally accepted truth, at least to my liberal ensconced knowledge, (am I wrong on this?) and yet those who would propose to draw a similar line with greenhouse gases seem to be up against those who consider even the remote possibility to be too far fetched to warrant the slightest attention.
As an end note the CEI ad brought to my mind the interesting analogy of pollutants and weeds. As an adult I think of dandelions as a horrible weed that can quickly take over my lawn, but fatherhood has shown me the little girl's perspective of a pretty flower that can delight with the ability to blow the seeds from the stalk. My personal solution as a father is to encourage the delight in dandelions out in a wild field, yet require extreme care on how they are carried home. Its all about the balance.
Posted by: silence dogood at June 5, 2006 3:02 PMI read the section you mentioned twice when I read the article, the prison terms for little girls convicted of dandecide are Chait's words, not the commercial's. Michael Moore in "Bowling for Columbine" took the accepted-as-over-the-top Willie Horton ad, and added graphics to make it worse. Chait does the same here.
I added links so that you can see the ad. I challenge you to find one thing in it that is factually incorrect or even overblown.
You're tired of overblown rhetoric and welcome rational debate, put 'er there buddy! It is the "warmies" that over-hype and use doomsday scenarios that are unfounded. The rhetoric is 100 times more overblown on the other side.
No, that's overblown. It is only 83.4 times more overblown. I really shouldn't exaggerate.
Posted by: jk at June 5, 2006 5:38 PMAnd I didn't mean to dodge direct questions. I would not counter the existence of man-made smog.
CO and NOx are clearly poison in all but small quantities, without a trained dentist's supervision. Although they occur naturally, adding more to the atmosphere seems an easier sell as a no-no.
Back 'round to my point. I like this commercial for pointing out the difference. And it gets bonus points for pointing out the lifestyle advantages of using energy for wealth creation.
Posted by: jk at June 5, 2006 6:19 PMAnd the word I was looking for is "dandeleocide." My mistake.
Posted by: jk at June 5, 2006 7:39 PMNo problem JK, the whole premise of the ad is not factual. There is a current attempt to label CO2 as a greenhouse gas, which factually it is. There is no attempt to label it a pollutant, the ad does not point out the difference, it mixes the two completely.
So what is factual in the ad? We do exhale CO2 (no mention of the all important quantities) plants do absorb CO2 (breathing it would require a respiratory system, but I'll give them that one), and the burning of fossil fuels for energy has developed civilization to how we know it today.
Overblown rhetoric? How about the image of the gaunt woman grinding grain with a stick? Kinda ignores a few centuries of civilization don't you think? Even completely removing the use of fossil fuels would still leave us a long way from that, but images of a farmer plowing a field with a horse or a water wheel grinding grain doesn't pack quite the punch of a malnourished woman with a stick. The words are not stated, but the implication is clear that controlling CO2 emissions is going to cause you to take time away from writing code to grind your corn meal with a stick to make your dinner. Ditto for the implication that something as natural as CO2 could not possibly be bad for you.
It is not so much what you say, as how you say it, or for complicated scientific topics like this how you mix pieces of real science with a bunch of so called common sense mumbo jumbo. How dare we allow the mixing of toxic, explosively unstable metals with poisonous chemicals (table salt).
Dandelions are lawn terrorists and combatants and should be locked away indefinitely, and we should contemplate building walls around our lawns to control their movement.
Posted by: silence dogood at June 6, 2006 10:21 AMI strongly disagree that people are not moving to label an regulate CO2 as a pollutant. If not directly, they throw it in a basket with its unfriendly cousins. The point of the ad is to pull it out and look objectively at what it is.
Are you proposing the rock as the technological advance to the stick? Because most of the ones which come to my mind use energy. Yes it's a long way from here to there, but the Institute makes an important point that using less energy is going to cost us.
(Don't knock the stick -- my wife's preparations for Y2K were to buy an old fashioned coffee grinder and some bottled water. We have a wood stove and figured we could live without everything else. The grinder has a place of honor now as the bullet we dodged.)
In the end it baffles me that we see this so differently. They don't say we're going back to the stick, they show the benefits of innovation. VP Gore, conversely, says that the trade center memorial will be underwater. I think we're comparing poetic license to polemic.
Posted by: jk at June 6, 2006 1:34 PMNo, I think we will have to disagree on this one. On the cataclysmic scale it is tough to beat total global destruction, or at least massive flooding, but to imply that with limited CO2 emissions we are headed for African subsistence is a bit of a whopper as well. I also extremely dislike the slippery slope argument that CO2 will soon be a full fledged pollutant. If we take the slippery slope concept to its conclusion, we should never decide anything for fear that our politicians will misuse the information.
Everything uses energy JK, at least anything that does work over time. I was simply thinking that stock footage of Amish folk in this country would be a much closer approximation than an image obviously from an impoverished African nation.
Coffee grinder and bottled water, I love it. Conservative you may be, but that is very bohemian.
Posted by: silence dogood at June 7, 2006 2:39 PM | What do you think? [7]