'Carbon Dioxide... We Call It Life,' U.S. TV Ads Say

May 18, 2006 — By Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters
WASHINGTON — A little girl blows away dandelion fluff as an announcer says, "Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life," in an advertisement targeting global warming "alarmists," especially Al Gore.

The television ads, screened for the press Wednesday and set to air in 14 U.S. cities starting Thursday, are part of a campaign by the Competitive Enterprise Institute to counter a media spotlight on threats posed by worldwide climate change.

The spots are timed to precede next week's theatrical release of "An Inconvenient Truth," a documentary film on global warming that features Gore, the former vice president and Democratic presidential candidate.

Against backdrops of a park, a beach and a forest, one celebrates the benefits of greenhouse gas-producing fuels.

"The fuels that produce CO2 (carbon dioxide) have freed us from a world of back-breaking labor, lighting up our lives, allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people we love," the ad runs. "Now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed -- what would our lives be like then?"

The other ad questions media reports of the threat of climate change, especially a Time magazine issue devoted to the topic, and shows film of a glacier melting and then runs in reverse to show the glacier reconstituting itself.

"We had started work on this several months back, but we sort of changed course once the flood of glacier-melting stories began," said Sam Kazman, an institute lawyer who worked on the ads. "So we did want to get out there before the Al Gore film got into national opening."

'RUNNING FOR ARCH-DRUID'

Fred Smith, president of the institute, a nonprofit that advocates free enterprise and limited government regulation, said he had seen the film and found it "very alarmist," although well-produced.

"There's a lot of pictures of Al Gore pensively looking into the sunset," Smith said. "I don't think he's running for president, but he might be running for arch-druid."

The institute and environmental groups such as Washington-based Environmental Defense agree that average global temperatures have risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the last century.

But the institute questions the impact of global warming while a broad range of scientists and environmentalists, including Gore, have linked it to more severe storms, melting ice caps and rising sea levels.

"They fly in the face of most of the science," Charlie Miller of Environmental Defense said of the institute ads. "The good news is that there's not a trade-off here between prosperity, jobs, growth and protecting the Earth. We can do both."

Environmental Defense and the Ad Council released public service announcements in March featuring children as future victims of global warming, and these were mentioned critically at the briefing where the new ads were released.

The institute ads will run from May 18 through May 28 in Albany, New York; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Anchorage, Alaska; Austin, Texas; Charleston, West Virginia; Dallas; Dayton, Ohio; Denver; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Phoenix; Sacramento and Santa Barbara, California; Springfield, Illinois, and Washington.

Source: Reuters

We really do need a puking smilie. Because this crap elicits that sort of reaction from me. I guess I'll just have to borrow DU's version for now:

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=10481

Big Oil Launches Attack On Al Gore

Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute CEI) will unveil two 60-second TV ads focusing on what it calls “global warming alarmism and the call by some environmental groups and politicians to reduce fossil fuel and carbon dioxide emissions.” The ad, which will be aired in more than a dozen cities across the country, is being released just a week before the May 24th opening (in LA and NYC) of Al Gore’s new movie on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth.

Who is CEI? The Washington Post explains:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which widely publicizes its belief that the earth is not warming cataclysmically because of the burning of coal and oil, says Exxon Mobil Corp. is a “major donor” largely as a result of its effort to push that position.

CEI also gets funding from other oil companies through the American Petroleum Institute. Exxon documents reveal the company gave $270,000 to CEI in 2004 alone. $180,000 of that was earmarked for “global climate change and global climate change outreach.” Exxon has contributed over $1.6 million to CEI since 1998.

CEI’s general counsel Sam Kazman said, “I think what attracted [Exxon] to us was our position on global warming.” CEI’s position? The Institute believes the dangers of global warming are akin “to that of ‘an alien invasion.”

Exxon’s spokesperson Tom Cirigliano has explained why the company is so dedicated to funding CEI’s pushback on global warming:

We want to support organizations that are trying to broaden the debate. … There is this whole issue that no one should question the science of global climate change that is ludicrous. That’s the kind of dark-ages thinking that gets you in a lot of trouble.

The science is not questioned because the science behind global warming is indisputable. Science Magazine analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003. Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus that the earth’s temperature is rising due to human activity. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program concluded that humans are driving the warming trend through greenhouse gas emissions. And the EPA has said that the recent warming trend “is real and has been particularly strong within the past 20 years…due mostly to human activities.”

For the oil industry, Al Gore’s film exposing the truth is perceived as a threat, and they have no shortage of funds to try to distort it.

Filed under: Global Warming
Posted by Faiz May 17, 2006 12:39 pm

New Ads Funded by Big Oil Portray Global Warming Science as Smear Campaign Against Carbon Dioxide

Yesterday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute – a front group funded by ExxonMobil and other big oil companies – launched two advertisements in response to Al Gore’s new movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

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.”

Watch it here:



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.

The second ad repeats the “carbon dixoide is our friend” theme but adds a new wrinkle. It attempts to show that the scientific evidence for global warming is in dispute, claiming a study found “Greenland’s glaciers are growing.” (Watch the second ad HERE)

Actually, the study by Johanessen et al.) found that there was an increase in snow accumulation on Greenland’s interior. Meanwhile, other studies show that glaciers are thinning on Greenland’s coastal regions. This is exactly what you’d expect as the earth gets warmer. The climate scientists at realclimate.org explain:

However, Johanessen et al. were not able to measure all of the coastal ranges. Indeed, the thinning of the margins and growth in the interior Greenland is an expected response to increased temperatures and more precipitation in a warmer climate. These results present no contradiction to the accelerated sliding near the coasts

Expect more of this kind of deception from the right as An Inconvient Truth hits theaters on May 24.

Filed under: Global Warming
Posted by Judd at 10:07 am

Carbon Dioxide... They call it pollution... we call it life.