Voices of dissent

Capitalizing on global warming alarmism, Washington lawmakers are debating how much new tax revenue they can drain from rich and greedy corporations -- and thus, indirectly, impose on our gas and electric bills -- by punishing those who generate the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

But -- assuming Earth is still warming -- are carbon dioxide and other human-generated greenhouse gases responsible?

In Montana, a new advocacy group opposed to climate legislation, called "C02 Is Green," is taking aim at the next big battle for Congress, reports Steven Mufson of The Washington Post.

The group is already running television ads: "This will cost us jobs," says one. "There is no scientific evidence that CO2 is a pollutant. In fact, higher CO2 levels than we have today would help the Earth's ecosystems." It urges voters to contact Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who in the past has backed bills to cap emissions and allow companies to trade "pollution allowances."

The man behind the latest entry to the climate legislation wars is H. Leighton Steward, a veteran oil industry executive, co-author of the "Sugar Busters!" dieting books and winner of an Environmental Protection Agency award for a report on damage being done to Mississippi wetlands. Now retired, he says he wants to "get the message out there" that carbon dioxide, which the Supreme Court has deemed a pollutant and which many global warming zealots regard as a dangerous greenhouse gas -- but which is necessary to life on Earth -- "is a net benefit for the planet."

In addition to the ads aimed at Baucus, the "CO2 Is Green" group has taken out television ads in New Mexico, home to Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat, and a half-page ad ran in last Monday's Washington Post. Mr. Steward points out that prehistoric global temperature changes preceded changes in levels of CO2 -- not the other way around -- and sometimes did not correlate with them at all.

Mr. Steward is not alone. Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia has noted there is indeed a problem with global warming -- it stopped in 1998.

"According to official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., the global average temperature did not increase between 1998-2005," Mr. Carter wrote in 2006. "This eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."

More CO2, but no more warming? Hmm.