Another section:
Our Friend CO2
Ten years ago, Fred Smith says, the Competitive Enterprise Institute had contributions from companies across the board in the petroleum industry. It still gets money from Exxon Mobil, the biggest and most hard-line oil company on the climate change issue, but many of its donors have stopped sending checks.
"They've joined the club."
The club of believers in global warming.
The executives don't understand "resource economics." They lack faith in the free market to solve these issues. And they go to cocktail parties and find out that everyone thinks they're criminals.
"Or their kids come home from school and say, 'Daddy, why are you killing the planet?'"
Smith never sounds morose, though. He's peppy. He thinks his side is still winning the debate. Look at the polls: Americans don't care about global warming.
He'd like to get people believing once again in good old-fashioned industrial activity. CEI has created a new public-service TV spot. Smith and several colleagues gather round as we watch it on a computer monitor. The ad begins with images of people picnicking in Central Park on a beautiful day. A child is shown blowing the seeds of a dandelion. A woman's voice, confident, reassuring, says that all these people are creating something that's all around us:
"It's called carbon dioxide," she says, "CO2."
There's an image of an impoverished woman hacking the ground with a hand tool.
"The fuels that produce CO2 have freed us from a life of backbreaking labor."
We see kids jumping out of a minivan. There are politicians out there who want to label CO2 as a pollutant, the narrator says. We return to the child blowing the dandelion seeds.
"Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life."
Good grief! I learned in high school that we all exhale CO2. Global warming by CO2 is a joke.
The anti global warming regime will allow vaguely defined institutions to control national economies. One more step in eradicating national sovereignty.