Say What? We Need More CO2, Says Oil Industry Exec

There's the big lie. There's the whopper lie. And then there's the oil industry and its capacity to go beyond the lie to the realm of absurdity. In the same week that a House committee is holding hearings on letters the industry faked last summer to convince lawmakers to oppose the climate and energy legislation comes a Web site devoted to convince people we - get this! -- need to put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

That’s according to H. Leighton Steward, co-author of the “Sugar Busters!” diet books, veteran of the oil industry, honorary director of the American Petroleum Institute, and one of the forces behind the CO2 is Green Web site. His partner in this venture is Corbin J. Robertson Jr., chief executive of and leading shareholder in Natural Resource Partners, an owner of coal resources.

Their argument, in a nutshell: carbon dioxide cannot be a pollutant because we exhale it and plants need it to grow. Their site boasts of a petition signed by 31,478 scientists (9,029 of them with Ph.D.s, the site says), that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be beneficial; more CO2 means better crops, but not necessarily a warmer planet since other factors play a bigger role in heating the planet.

Now comes sanity and reason and science. Dr. Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford and winner of the collective 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with his colleagues on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, asserts: “Fraud is their middle name. These guys lie with impunity. They’re counting on the media to cover it and the average person not to look it up.” Schneider compares these stalling and dissembling tactics of the oil and coal industries on climate change now to what the tobacco companies did in the 1950s. “They know they’re lying, same as tobacco industry did, and they’re getting away with it again.”

While it’s true that carbon dioxide makes plants in isolation grow, too much carbon dioxide -- as any herder in the Himalayas or hunter in the arctic or farmer on the Colorado Plateau already knows -- distorts ecosystems. “Some plants grow faster – it makes weeds grow faster—and then they crowd out others. Carbon dioxide also makes the climate warmer – we’ve seen a 400 percent increase in fires in the West – and it acidifies the oceans.”

Schneider’s newest book, “Science as a Contact Sport,” is a 40-year history of why we have failed so far to get a good climate policy. The media, he says, bear a great deal of responsibility – for their adherence to the sound bite system, use of out of context quotes and attempts to divide issues into simple (and equal) pro and con sides. “This is not a bipolar issue,” Schneider says. “We’re not talking about politics; we’re talking about science. System science works on a preponderance of evidence. And there is a vast preponderance of evidence on climate change.”

That won't stop Steward and Robertson, who've also created the site Plants Need CO2, which has a similar message to CO2 is Green, and applied for charitable status for both.

Besides traveling to Washington last week to lobby against the energy bill – “I’m trying to kill the whole thing,” he told a reporter – Steward is running tv ads in Montana and New Mexico (Montana's Sen. Max Baucus and New Mexico's Sen. Jeff Bingaman are on committees considering laws on emission of greenhouse gases) with a pro-carbon dioxide message.

-- Suzanne Bopp