I didn't think Fox could surprise me anymore, but they just aired a spot for the Competitive Enterprise Institute and their "We Call It Life" pro-CO2 ad campaign. CO2, it seems, is being unfairly maligned by the liberal establishment, and citizens must be mobilized to put an end to senate hearings that might result in CO2 being categorized as a pollutant. It's not a pollutant! This little girl cannot possibly be exhaling pollutants!The CEI website has similarly nauseating supporting material, but I found the bio for their Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy, Myron Ebell, the most telling; They list WITH PRIDE the fact that Greenpeace and other activist groups labeled him a bad guy. It epitomizes the awfulness of modern American Politics: issues are not fought on the basis of ideas and facts, but on who can assemble a better blacklist. Greenpeace blacklists Ebell, thereby allowing Ebell to blacklist Greenpeace and pander to his conservative base. Americans on either side of political spectrum can be cowed into an "in group" more easily than they can be persuaded by information.
I buy the argument I heard on Nova. Unless drastic action is taken in the next 10 years, global warming will become irreversible. We currently can choose between keeping the only climate civilization has ever known, or force our children to adapt to a new climate with unknown consequences. My trust goes to scientists (and even politicans) who explain an inconvenient truth when it arises, not to Institutes that launch ad campaigns to snuff the life out of reasoned public discourse.