“Carbon dioxide… we call it life,” TV ads say

By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A little girl blows away dandelion
fluff as an announcer says, “Carbon dioxide: they call it
pollution; we call it life,” in an advertisement targeting
global warming “alarmists,” especially Al Gore.

The television ads, screened for the press on Wednesday and
set to air in 14 U.S. cities starting on Thursday, are part of
a campaign by the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute
to counter a media spotlight on threats posed by worldwide
climate change.

The spots are timed to precede next week’s theatrical
release of “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary film on
global warming that features Gore, the former vice president
and Democratic presidential candidate.

Against backdrops of a park, a beach and a forest, one
celebrates the benefits of greenhouse gas-producing fuels.

“The fuels that produce CO2 (carbon dioxide) have freed us
from a world of back-breaking labor, lighting up our lives,
allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people
we love,” the ad runs. “Now some politicians want to label
carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed — what
would our lives be like then?”

The other ad questions media reports of the threat of
climate change, especially a Time magazine issue devoted to the
topic, and shows film of a glacier melting and then runs in
reverse to show the glacier reconstituting itself.

“We had started work on this several months back, but we
sort of changed course once the flood of glacier-melting
stories began,” said Sam Kazman, an institute lawyer who worked
on the ads. “So we did want to get out there before the Al Gore
film got into national opening.”

‘RUNNING FOR ARCH-DRUID’

Fred Smith, president of the institute, a lobbying group
closely allied to the Bush administration that stresses limited
government regulation and a free-market approach to
environmental issues, said he had seen the film and found it
“very alarmist,” although well-produced.

“There’s a lot of pictures of Al Gore pensively looking
into the sunset,” Smith said. “I don’t think he’s running for
president, but he might be running for arch-druid.”

The institute and environmental groups such as
Washington-based Environmental Defense agree that average
global temperatures have risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6
degrees Celsius) in the last century.

But the institute questions the impact of global warming
while a broad range of scientists and environmentalists,
including Gore, have linked it to more severe storms, melting
ice caps and rising sea levels.

“They fly in the face of most of the science,” Charlie
Miller of Environmental Defense said of the institute ads. “The
good news is that there’s not a trade-off here between
prosperity, jobs, growth and protecting the Earth. We can do
both.”

Environmental Defense and the Ad Council released public
service announcements in March featuring children as future
victims of global warming, and these were mentioned critically
at the briefing where the new ads were released.

The institute ads will run from May 18 through May 28 in
Albany, New York; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Anchorage, Alaska;
Austin, Texas; Charleston, West Virginia; Dallas; Dayton, Ohio;
Denver; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Phoenix; Sacramento and Santa
Barbara, California; Springfield, Illinois, and Washington.