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Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Carbon dioxide does not “cause” global warming, and its absense would not affect global cooling either.

Carbon dioxide could climb to 1500 parts per million, more than three times the current level, with absolutely no ill effects whatsoever, except that growing green plants would become much more luxuriant, and the oxygen content of the air would INCREASE. As well as the world’s total amount of carbohydrates (cellulose, lignin, sugar, starches, you know, stuff we EAT and USE every day).

If somebody wants to do something about carbon dioxide, then reclaim the substance from smokestacks, cool and compress it into liquid form, and use it as an industrial chemical. Where did you think the fizz in your Coke came from? Soft drinks do not generate the CO2 on their own in the bottle, as does wine. It is intentionally added in the process of bottling. And it snorts back out your nose when you gulp the soft drink down.

There are many other uses for CO2, both as a liquid (great for charging up fire extinguishers), and as a solid (”dry ice” is an excellent agent for preserving substances with cold). Carbon dioxide, pressurized and injected into rock formations as a liquid, also flushes out hydrocarbons trapped in the interstices of rock, by DISSOLVING the hydrocarbons, and washing them out, thereby restoring what had been considered a “dry” oil well. Injected very deep into the earth at the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, the boundry between the earth’s rocky mantle and the molten interior, the chemistry there turns the carbon dioxide into free carbon, which forms coal, or in the presense of water molecules (really superheated steam that is not allowed to expand because of the pressure), the precursor to petroleum, kerogen, is continuously being formed. The world is not, and never will, run out of petroleum, as it is continuously being generated by abiotic means.

That is another myth, that there is somehow a “peak oil” beyond which we shall only have declining supplies. This is blatant nonsense, because if we really NEED petroleum, we can make it, and we already do, by several different processes all based on the Fischer-Tropf reactions, in which water and coal are converted to carbon monoxide and free hydrogen. In the presence of catalysts, the carbon monoxide and the hydrogen recombine into various forms of hydrocarbons, while the catalysts capture and hold the excess oxygen. It takes heat, it takes pressure, and it takes a lot of perserverance, but we CAN make petroleum.